Parting Questions

When we launched Progress in Community Health Partnerships (PCHP) in 2007, our goal was to establish a national peer-reviewed journal dedicated to work involving community health partnerships. In the first issue of PCHP, we presented a vision for achieving progress in the work of community health partnerships.¹ We outlined eight areas of scholarly activity in which PCHP would accept manuscript submissions, and we made recommendations about the topics, issues, and problems that needed to be addressed to promote greater use of community-based participatory research (CBPR).

As the outgoing Editor-in-Chief of PCHP, I am extremely proud of what the PCHP team has accomplished. The Journal has developed a national and international reputation, as evidenced by the submissions we have received from all over the world. The Journal also has gained approval for inclusion in MEDLINE® (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online)—the principal online bibliographic citation database of the United States National Library of Medicine. The worldwide users of MEDLINE® are health care practitioners, investigators, educators, students, administrators, and policy makers. The National Library of Medicine typically accepts only 20 to 25 percent of applications from new journals, basing its decisions on multiple criteria including the scientific content of the journal and the quality of the journal's editorial and production processes.² PCHP's inclusion in MEDLINE® has great value in fostering further growth of the Journal. That value was confirmed when Community Campus Partnerships for Health (courtesy of Doug Brugge, PhD, MS) distributed data earlier this year showing that PCHP was the number one journal for publishing CBPR.³

Although I will miss the daily stimulation of interacting with the authors, reviewers, and editorial team members who contributed to PCHP's successful launch, I know it is in the best interests of the Journal to have a new Editor-in-Chief leading it through the next phase of growth. It is a bit easier to relinquish the position knowing that my successor, Dr. Darius Tandon, is superbly qualified to lead PCHP to even greater achievements. With full confidence in Dr. Tandon and the entire PCHP team, I offer a few parting questions.

1. 1. Should the editorial team expect more studies to engage community partners in all aspects of the research?

   In the weekly meetings of our editorial team, one of the most frequent questions we asked about manuscripts was about the degree to which a given project truly engaged the community. Few manuscripts met the ideal standard of CBPR which calls for the community to be engaged in all aspects of the work.⁴ How much engagement is enough? Sometimes we had to ask authors to provide more explanation of how the community was engaged in the work, and sometimes we asked why a community member was not included as an author. Not infrequently, authors were able to provide additional explanation—and include community members as authors—even though community members were involved in only portions of the work. By emphasizing the importance of describing how community partners were engaged in the work, we sought to raise expectations for community engagement. Perhaps it is time to raise the bar higher.

2. 2. Should the editorial team expect more studies to have strong study designs to maximize internal validity?

   The credibility of a peer-reviewed journal depends on the quality or validity of the original research published in it. We were fortunate to have enough high quality original research to meet the NLM's criteria for inclusion in MEDLINE®. A large portion of the original research used qualitative research methods. Few studies used quantitative methods and a strong experimental design. As community partnerships grow stronger, I hope to see more frequent use of quantitative methods and strong study designs. Moreover, I hope that PCHP will have a prominent role in promoting the use of better study designs for assessing the capacity development, impact, and sustainability of complex interventions involving complex communities.⁵ As suggested by Trickett et al ⁵, a new paradigm is needed to advance the science of community-level interventions. The Journal can foster advancement of the science of...