Page 6 - ISAKOS 2018 Winter Newsletter

JISAKOS ORIGINAL RESEARCH
From Rookie to Pro: JISAKOS Now Publishes Original Research!
C. Niek Van Dijk, MD, PhD Journal of ISAKOS Editor in Chief Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS
Big News for 2018!
This year JISAKOS has come of age, and enters the main arena. For NASCAR fans amongst you, it is the year we cast off our rookie’s yellow-stripe. As for baseball fans, please forgive me – I’m a Dutchman, and just don’t understand how a rookie makes the grade. The calculation seems rather complicated.
But for journals, it is simple enough. A journal only reaches maturity when it publishes original research; and not just meta-studies, but bold new ideas and techniques. When it’s confident enough to go out and compete with long- established journals, compete with them for the best new minds and the best new work. At JISAKOS we think we are ready for this, our next challenge. So this year we’ll be publishing original research. And we invite you all to submit your manuscripts!
Why Another Journal?
As you remember, it was a long-cherished dream for ISAKOS to have its own journal. But there was much soul-searching before we took the plunge. At the time I joked about the Duke of Edinburgh, by way of elucidation. Somebody brave once asked him why he’d married the Queen of England. His reply was cryptic, but it suggested volumes: “because she was there...”
The Duke might have waxed lyrical: “she is the world’s most desirable bride, and her husband will inherit a thousand years of tradition and prestige (not to mention the money)”. He could have been offhand: “well, somebody had to, and I was a Prince, so I was on the short-list”. And he might have added, as was his style: “it’s a damn difficult job, but it does need doing, and doing properly”. All of these applied, and more.
We were not suggesting that the noble Duke did a SWOT analysis and a time-and-motion, before he proposed marriage. But we certainly did, before we launched JISAKOS. Most men dream of marrying royalty, after all, but there were pressing questions we needed to face.
Why launch another orthopaedic sports-medicine journal when the field was already crowded? What could we add that others had missed, and how could we establish ourselves? After all, every journal has its own mission statement and scope, and they all read much the same. I doubt that anybody would notice if they all got muddled and substituted, one for another.
The Duke of Edinburgh might have replied: “well, every successful association needs a journal, just as every man needs a well-fitting suit, and every Queen needs someone like me”. That is, no professional society was complete without its journal, and ISAKOS was a truly global society — its 3000 members may cluster in North America and Europe and Asia, but really they are scattered around the world — and there has never been a truly global journal on this topic. But now there is, and it is called JISAKOS.
Then the second question: what could JISAKOS do that the others hadn’t already accomplished? And how could we distinguish ourselves from all the other journals? After all, there were only so many good articles, and all the journals were competing for them, with an eye for their “impact-factors”.
Getting Started
We had some novel ideas, which helped us find our feet. We published a series of what we called State-of-the-Art articles, which together gives a broad survey of where we are now: our present state of diagnosis and treatment, the ‘pros and cons’ of various alternatives, and of future possibilities. From this we hope to predict how the field shall develop and, more importantly, where it might need to develop. We believe that JISAKOS can perform this task, because we alone have the global-reach. Each State-of-the-Art has three authors from around the world, to ensure a real breadth. By comparison, all other journals are parochial. They only reflect their particular part of the world, and their own experience or bias.
Our aim is to spread knowledge and research globally, and thereby improve our patients’ quality of life (our ultimate task). Obviously we are there to guide our readers, but we also like to entertain them, and give them a deeper perspective. That is the idea behind our Classic articles, each of which is a “time capsule”, and captures a moment in time, the moment when something important had been published. The idea is to put our present praxis into a historical perspective. To give a sense of how we have reached where we are, and just how far we have come. And perhaps, to teach us humility, because a Classic can also describe something that subsequently has become obsolete, however “cutting-edge” at the time.
One of our vanities of science is that we view the past with a sense of superiority. We tend to believe that we finally solved the big problems thanks to our own brilliance, and that the future will only need to tweak things here and there.
4 ISAKOS NEWSLETTER 2018: VOLUME I