Here are a few things I’ve learned from over 35 years of reading scientific journals. When I was a Pharm.D. student, a routine Saturday meant using a month of saved change at the library to photocopy and staple enough articles to fill a wire in-basket. Current reviews were readily available on topics related to the patients I encountered on clinical rotations. No topic was beyond my interest, and I felt that the world of therapeutics was like an ocean to be sailed. However, no single journal served all of my needs.

Moreover, the process of photocopying journals had its drawbacks. Although the occasional discovery of an entire journal issue devoted to a single topic of interest meant fewer trips to the stacks, other journals were bound and too thick to be copied. This resulted in articles reproduced with an inch of blurred text on one side. Eventually, I realized that my investment in time and dimes undermined the time available to read and digest my harvest of research and reviews. The old adage seemed to apply—I needed to either fish or cut bait. There had to be a better way to access the world’s scientific knowledge.

Subscriptions were available for all journals, so I devised a list of those that published the articles I was most keenly interested in and narrowed down my list of journals to a handful. Then, I subscribed to several pharmaceutical and medical journals. Thus, I no longer wasted library time by standing in line for a copy machine; instead, I perused the current contents from which reprint requests could be generated and delivered directly to my mailbox. Eventually, though, the piles of journals and articles became too high. They occupied too much shelf space, constantly fell over, or concealed a specific issue from a casual search.

have stopped archiving physical journals. The collective resources behind Google Scholar now serve as my current library. With computer storage memory readily available, the task becomes one of organization rather than access or attainment. This brings me to my original point.

Pharmacotherapy has a limited number of pages, physical and electronic, that can be published each month. Fortunately, however, all issues of the journal are now archived online for downloading to anyone with Internet access. Moreover, the search function on the journal website is a gateway to a treasure of articles on topics of interest. As Pharmacotherapy’s international reach increases with foreign downloads, so does the global readership’s breadth of interests. Thus, Pharmacotherapy can only meet the range of human pharmacology and drug therapy topics important to the readership to a limited extent.

The content of Pharmacotherapy that is published each month, far from being random, is in fact the result of a thoughtful process. The editors depend on unsolicited manuscript submissions, from which they choose the articles most impactful for publication. Fortunately, the number of annual submissions has been increasing for several years. In the future, invited submissions will occupy a larger proportion of each issue.

Each month, the editors strive to create a balance among the manuscripts submitted to include new research, therapeutic reviews, case reports, and special articles of interest. Some submissions are better suited for other journals. For instance, advances in pharmacotherapy that are stimulated from in vitro and animal studies are best left to journals that specialize in these topics. A well-written review on an esoteric topic or condition must be weighed against its value to a larger proportion of the readership that might better benefit from an updated review of a common therapeutic problem. One journal does not typically fit all the needs of its readers. The editors of Pharmacotherapy strive to publish a journal with constantly increasing value to ACCP and other pharmacotherapy communities.