Abstract
This issue marks the end of Volume 25 of your journal. We hope that you will find it interesting and useful. These 15 articles reflect the broad spectrum of telemedicine research and experience and are selected to be useful to your efforts in our field. Eight of the articles are from outside the United States and come from four continents. The technology ranges from robotics to handheld devices to wearable virtual reality to internet applications. There are studies of economics, clinical outcomes, and clinical management. The articles are specific to psychiatry, teleradiology, pressure ulcers, teledermatology, emergency medicine, sleep monitoring, and hand trauma. There is an article on veterinary monitoring from Africa and one on orthodontics from Brazil. The articles are eclectic, indicating the breadth of our field.
You might wonder how articles are selected for a particular issue. We go strictly by the queue in order of acceptance. There is no jumping ahead except in very special circumstances. This order has always seemed the fairest to our authors. There could be a policy to accumulate articles by topic. That might make one issue very interesting to a minority of our readers. However, publishing the panoply of material, we hope to make each issue of interest to most through its variety and depth. If the result is a rejection, we hope the criticism will aid the authors in their next endeavor. The most common decision is for a revision. Only one of the articles this month was recommended for acceptance on first review. All the others, including one article by one of us was sent back for a revision. This does not necessarily mean that the article has a terrible flaw. More often the reviewers and editors have recommended changes to make the article more useful for the readers.
We aim to make the articles better and stronger. Often the author is so close to the subject that the questions that arise to the reader that may detract from overall usefulness of the article simply do not occur to the writers. Also, the critiques need to be answered not on a message to the reviewers but in a change in the narrative of the article. Questions arising in the minds of the reviewers are almost certainly going to be in the eyes of the readers. If these questions can be resolved in the narrative, the reader can absorb the message of the authors in a more productive manner.
The reviewers do not always agree! Thoughtful response to a reviewer, whose specific recommendation has not been followed, usually means letting that reviewer know what was picked up by another reviewer perhaps with a different expertise. The authors do not always agree with our decisions. Some are crestfallen and need a little nudge onto success. Others are so committed to the article as written that we need to be polite and constructive. With a little diplomacy, almost all the articles sent for revision come back with a solid response and go on to publication. We suppose it follows that the editors are not always in agreement! We are not clones but bring our own perspectives. However, we share the same sense of excellence and fairness and there has never been a disagreement we could not resolve amicably and constructively.
Selecting articles for publication is our duty and the people served are our authors and readers. Our reviewers are peers and experts. Each has published in your journal and has declared areas of special expertise. They are not judges who declare for either ejection or acceptance. They are asked to make meaningful criticisms and we believe they rise to the occasion. In the first issue of Volume 26, we will speak more in gratitude to your wonderful and hardworking reviewers.
We would like to thank the authors for their extraordinary efforts to advance our discipline and bring sound scholarship to bear as we stabilize our view of current practice and anticipate the next steps to further advance telemedicine. The telemedicine tools continue to seep into every corner of medical practice and progress. There is no area of medicine and geography for which telemedicine is not highly relevant.
Finally, we thank our readers. This is indeed your journal and your editors are committed to making it useful for you. We can discern your opinions by the number of downloads for each article. Was it really read? We do not get much correspondence but would welcome your suggestions. This journal has been around for 25 years and is pretty well established. We have been your editors for 15 of those years. Congratulations to the telemedicine community and let us just wonder at the changes and advances to come.