A new era for the Journal of Endocrinology and Journal of Molecular Endocrinology

Abstract

The Journal of Endocrinology (JOE) was founded seventy-three years ago as a vehicle for publishing research in the endocrine sciences. Over the ensuing years the journal proved a vital forum to report the major expansion in endocrinology over this period including a multitude of highly cited articles describing new assays, new hormones and new concepts in endocrinology. However, during the 1970s a technological explosion began with the development of recombinant DNA techniques and DNA sequencing, followed a decade later by invention of the PCR. Understanding of endocrine mechanisms was one of the earliest sectors to benefit from these new developments, and this prompted the founding of a new sister journal for JOE, the Journal of Molecular Endocrinology (JME). This journal development has been an outstanding success – a situation that continues to this day. The molecular biological revolution that began in the seventies and eighties has not of course spawned an independent discipline of molecular endocrinology. Rather, this technology has over the years become inherent in a multitude of aspects of endocrine science, to the extent that much of the work now published by JOE includes molecular biological methods. As a consequence the subject areas covered by the two journals has become blurred, with authors often uncertain as to which is the preferential journal for publishing their work. Recognizing this issue, the Publications Committee of the Society for Endocrinology commissioned a wide-ranging and independent in-depth review of its journal portfolio and its place in the universe of publication in endocrinology and metabolism. One of the conclusions of this exercise was that the remit of these two journals was indeed unclear and that many papers would be equally ‘at home’ in the sister journal. In an attempt to address this a new journal strategy has