Nice Journal

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 45, No. 2, March 2003, Page 69 Letters

Nice Journal! I have held licences and medical professional association memberships in four provinces and one state with plenty of journals to review. I received my first copy of your journal today, and I was very impressed with the cover, the contents being on the next page without a lot of hunting for them, the interesting articles, and the thoughtful opinions.

I particularly appreciated Dr Falk’s article on “Who needs medicare?” [BCMJ 2002;44(10):547-550]. After living in the US for 5 years, I purchased catastrophic health insurance for $2000 per year and found that more cost-effective than the “Cadillac” coverage even after my wife had emergency surgery and paying an additional deductible one year. It is unfortunate that the expensive Romanow report with all its resources didn’t appear to carefully evaluate “out-side-the-box” type of ideas such as this. If we are truly going to re-evaluate health care in this country, we need to look at every option thoroughly.

I also liked Dr Sutter’s “Learning and teaching medicine” [BCMJ 2003;44(10):554-555]. I have had the opportunity to learn in a variety of medical school environments as divergent as University of Toronto and McMaster University. I appreciated having learned by systems and disciplines before moving on to more problem-based learning. It was obvious that I had a more complete understanding of the systems than those coming from a problem-based approach. However, the problem-based approach helped further integrate my knowledge and ability to learn in the future. Dr Sutter is quite right in that time is crucial to integrate this knowledge. I wish I had more time in my training with all the specialists to learn the spectrum of disease presentations better and to develop a better feel for the clinical diagnosis and the limitations of diagnostic testing. Fortunately, experience after graduation has certainly helped.

Keep up the good work.

—Ronald Cridland, MD
Kelowna

Ronald Cridland, MD. Nice Journal. BCMJ, Vol. 45, No. 2, March, 2003, Page(s) 69 - Letters.



Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply