Today, we’re speaking to Euan Lawson, the Editor in Chief of the BJGP, about a number of issues around editing, the future of the journal and how you can get involved with the BJGP.

Here's a link to the BJGP Research and Publishing Conference: https://bjgp.org/conference

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:00 .400 - 00:00:55 .980

Hello and welcome to BJJP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan and I'm one of the associate editors of the bjjp. Thanks for taking the time today to listen to this podcast.

In today's episode, we're speaking to Euan Lawson, who is the editor in chief of the bjjp.

We're going to have a chat about a number of issues around the future of the Journal, around editorial issues and how you can get involved with the BJJP as well. So, hi, Ewan. Yeah, nice to see you. And just wanted to really start by saying thanks for joining me here today for this podcast.

But yeah, thanks for joining me here today, Ewan, just to have a general chat about things going on with BJGP and your role as editor.

And yeah, just a chance to catch up about some of your thoughts about issues around academic publishing and then just have a chat generally about other things that you've been thinking about as editor. So how's your week been?

Speaker B

00:00:57 .420 - 00:02:13 .730

We've already had that conversation before we got here. Now we won't go there again. As you know, it's not been perhaps my ideal week.

But as I'm delighted to be here and talking a little bit about what's going on with the Journal and just give a little bit of insight into how things are going, perhaps the biggest thing that we're I've recently written about the impact factor at the Journal, and perhaps the most important thing I need to say is that we don't worry too much about the impact factor.

I know we do quite well on the impact factor, but I wrote an editorial which really pointed out that we are much more interested in the real world influence of the journal rather than what is quite a narrow metric about citations. We're more interested in how it affects clinical, how the journal articles affect clinical practice, how they affect policy.

And we're really pushing, trying to push in that direction.

And once we get into worrying about the impact factor and there are a lot of perverse kind of incentives in academia and it can sometimes result in what's known as questionable research practices and things can just slide away from the ideal a little bit.

So that's perhaps one of the things that we're trying to concentrate on most in this coming months and years is just making sure that we keep our impact all about real world rather than anything else.

Speaker A

00:02:14 .130 - 00:02:26 .230

Yeah, you mentioned questionable research practices and you did talk about this in your editorial or your editor's briefing, but how do you think the Journal can tackle that head on?

Speaker B

00:02:27 .750 - 00:04:23 .309

I mean, it is challenging because it's.

The thing about QRP questionable research practices is that there's like they're a spectrum and they go from really very minor stuff, which is like, you know, giving you, a professor in your department authorship on a paper where they really didn't do anything, to a kind of a. The far end of the spectrum where you start to creep into outright research fraud.

And most researchers, and I think particularly in the primary care field though, you know, we'd always got to be. You always. One has to be careful about making assumptions, you know, are.

Have bags of integrity and do the best they can, but they're working in pressurized systems. And sometimes the QRPs are just things like that can be about the authorship or it can be about declarations of conflicts of interest.

It's how we go about doing our work in terms of how we quote other papers. Or sometimes it can be a little bit about how we tweak results to try to get positive results out because they're more likely to be published.

And those are perhaps the areas where as a journal we can be a little bit more helpful in that, you know, making sure we are quite happy to publish negative findings. We don't overstate results.

It's very easy as a journal to take a paper and there's a, you know, you want a brief summary of it to explain it to people. But it's important that we don't overstate and overinflate results that result in inaccurate messages going out about those papers.

So they're the kind of areas we can help. But let's not be under any illusions. It's a systems kind of problem.

Academic departments and the culture they have and the whole system of getting grants, publishing how those then get disseminated in the media as well. So it's a big old complex beast. And I think we just try and look at the areas journals may have the.

May have an impact, and we're trying to push things in the right direction.

Speaker A

00:04:23 .789 - 00:04:40 .109

Fair enough. And you mentioned impact and I just wanted to touch here on the BJJP research conference next year, which is going to have a focus on impact.

So talk us through what we're doing there and sort of what your aim is really to get that focus for the conference next year.

Speaker B

00:04:40 .269 - 00:06:24 .960

Yeah, I think one of the things I've always been keen on, the BJJP Research and Publishing Conference is that it's very much just, you know, it's a little bit something that we want to offer more for the Community, particularly early career researchers and academics.

But any GP that's got a scholar or primary care person, clinician, that's got an interest in sort of the scholarly aspects of work and understanding a little bit more about that. So we're a small, friendly conference. I certainly had some feedback recently that they were.

Someone was happy that they had had a really great experience and found it very welcoming. And I was really. I mean, that was that. I felt really pleased about that because that's certainly what we're aiming at.

And this year the theme is a little bit around impact and influence. We're very lucky to have a couple of speakers who really know about that.

We're going to have Rebecca Payne, who's the gp, former chair of RCGP Wales, and also we're going to have Prof. Martin Marshall, who was former chair of the college, of course, during COVID and is now over at the Nuffield Trust.

And I think that's a really interesting perspective because the think tanks like the Nuffield or the King's or, you know, Health foundation, others that are around, have an enormous understanding of how to influence policy through research and we're hoping that'll be really useful for people and give them an understanding. What we see a lot of is that people are.

People do the research, but often everybody knows you have to do something to try to make your research get your. Everyone wants to get the research out in the world, but far too often, and again, this is part of the way the system is set up.

People just stop at that point and nothing further happens beyond that. And there's so many opportunities in so many ways that you can actually develop that. So we want to try and help people a little bit with that.

Speaker A

00:06:25 .200 - 00:06:38 .160

Yeah, and we've talked a bit about that just in terms of actually the impact of research and disseminating the results, that actually makes an impact. And I think that's going to be an interesting angle to get from Martin, especially from his perspective as well.

Speaker B

00:06:38 .240 - 00:07:46 .020

Yeah, it'd be good to see. I want to. We should point out the last few years, all of the research in the journal is open access, so it's not paywalled at all.

And we're having conversations about reducing paywalls across the journal as well. So there. That's in development, but, you know, yeah, we're. We're keen to make sure that we can do. We're trying to do our bit.

It's important that stuff just doesn't disappear into the journal. There's a slight risk of that.

Perhaps some of my favorite moments as editor in the past couple of year, few years have been when I've heard about papers that have changed practice and policy. The very obvious one being the Sandvik paper about continuity, which has been really picked up in government level particularly.

I know in Scotland they're pushing hard on that.

But also when we hear from people like NB Medical or Red Whale or the other RCGP Essential Updates, when they take our papers and they're part of the look obviously across all journals, but when I hear about our papers that are then really being translated into actionable clinical findings, they're perhaps some of my best. That's why I really love seeing that. That's. I think that's really where we want to be and what we want to be doing.

Speaker A

00:07:46 .580 - 00:08:02 .740

Yeah.

And we've been talking about the clinical practice and analysis papers in the BJGP and we've often reflected on the fact