Update from the Journal of Physician Assistant Education

By P. Eugene Jones, PhD, PA-C
Editor-in-Chief

I hope by now you have all received your copy of the special 40th anniversary issue of the Journal of Physician Assistant Education. Many of you have been kind enough to give us very positive feedback about this issue, and we hope it will be an enduring resource for our profession. We also see this issue as providing an opportunity to show a wider audience some of the successes and innovations of PA education and, in addition to our regular distribution list, we will also be sending copies to various leaders in medical education. I’d like to ask for your help in this regard: If you have a spare copy of the journal, please consider sending one to your dean or even university president, or putting a routing label on a copy and circulating it to people you think would enjoy it. The national office also has a limited number of additional copies available for this purpose; please contact Eileen Evans at eevans@paeaonline.org to request one.

Now that the special issue has been put to bed, we are returning our attention to the regular submissions that we receive through our eJournal Press site. The quality and quantity of submissions has been increasing over the past few years, but we are always looking for quality research work, so I would encourage all of you to consider submitting an article. One word of advice: We still receive a number of articles presenting research done on single-program, single-cohort groups, or on a number of subjects that is too small to generate statistical power. These studies may be suitable for our Abstracts and Brief Reports section, but will not typically be considered for publication as research articles. I would encourage researchers to team up with their colleagues to develop research studies over multiple institutions and larger numbers of subjects. For more detail on this issue, there is a link on the PAEA Web site to the handouts from my presentation in Tucson: "Writing for the Journal of Physician Assistant Education.” And just a reminder: If you do submit an article for peer review, please do so through our eJournal Press portal at www.jpae.msubmit.net. Articles intended for the various feature sections should be sent directly to the appropriate feature editor — these are listed in each issue of the journal. If you have questions on these issues, please contact the journal staff at jpae@paeaonline.org.

Finally, the journal’s advisory board is reviewing the line-up of features and considering new features that might be added and those that might be retired. If you have ideas on new areas of medicine or education that may be worthy of a regular feature in our journal, please e-mail me at eugene.jones@utsouthwestern.edu. Thank you.