Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development

About Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development

Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development: Journal Profile

The Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to how doctors are taught, how curricula are designed and judged, and how students and teachers are assessed. Published by SAGE Publishing in the United Kingdom, identified by electronic ISSN 2382-1205, and in publication since 2014, it occupies a specific niche within medical education scholarship: it is less concerned with clinical findings themselves than with the educational systems that produce competent clinicians. Its articles ask whether a new curriculum works, how learners experience a teaching method, what an assessment actually measures, and how basic-science, clinical and postgraduate training can be improved with evidence rather than habit.

That focus matters because medical education is a field where tradition is strong and change is consequential. A curriculum committee deciding between large lectures and small-group learning, a dean introducing simulation, or a residency programme reforming workplace assessment is making choices that will affect thousands of patients indirectly through the doctors those choices shape. A journal that collects evaluated innovations — including failures and partial successes honestly reported — helps other schools avoid repeating expensive experiments blindly. Since its launch the journal has served that exchange as a fully open-access title, so a medical teacher in a low-resource setting can read the same article, on the same day, as a professor at a wealthy university.

Identity at a Glance

The journal's identity is easy to state but worth anchoring, because medical education has many similarly named titles. This is the SAGE journal with ISSN 2382-1205, launched in 2014 under Libertas Academica and transferred into the SAGE portfolio in 2016. It should not be confused with journals titled Medical Education, Academic Medicine, Medical Teacher or Advances in Medical Education and Practice, each of which has its own publisher, history and editorial policy. Authors citing work from this journal should use its full title or the standard abbreviation and should include the DOI, which is the permanent identifier the journal uses for its articles.

History: From Libertas Academica to SAGE

The ISSN Portal record summarises the journal's beginnings: it began in 2014, with Libertas Academica Ltd of Auckland, New Zealand as earliest publisher, and its first volume dates from that year. Libertas Academica built a list of open-access journals in clinical medicine and education, operating an author-pays model at a time when open access in medicine was expanding rapidly. The Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development was part of that wave, offering medical educators a venue that did not require readers to hold a subscription.

In 2016, according to SAGE's own advertising and journal pages, SAGE took over publication. That move changed the journal's production, marketing and platform context — articles now sit on the SAGE Journals platform alongside a large health-sciences list, submissions are handled through SAGE's systems, and the journal benefits from SAGE's arrangements with archiving services and indexing partners — while the title, ISSN and subject mission continued. SAGE describes it as published by SAGE since 2016 and highlights an expert editorial board. For authors, the practical consequence is that current instructions, fees and editorial contacts are the SAGE ones; guidance surviving on old Libertas Academica pages should be treated as historical.

The journal has published continuously since 2014. Continuous publication means articles appear online when ready rather than waiting for a printed issue to fill, a model well suited to education research that schools want to apply in the next academic cycle. Listings that describe its frequency as one issue a year are describing the annual collection into which continuously published articles are gathered, not a once-a-year appearance of new material. The h-index of 45 in the original Journals World record indicates a maturing citation footprint: forty-five articles cited at least forty-five times each is a substantial base for a young, specialised education journal, reflecting how widely curriculum and assessment papers are reused by other programmes reporting similar reforms.

Aims and Scope in Depth

The publisher's stated aim, summarised here, is to publish timely work on medical education practice and the development of novel curricula, and to help educators evaluate curriculum development, advances in instructional methods, individualised learning and the assessment of students and faculty. The scope spans three stages of a doctor's formation: basic-science education, clinical education and postgraduate training. Articles that examine transitions between those stages — the move from classroom to clerkship, or from residency to independent practice — sit naturally within that span.

Curriculum development and innovation is the journal's centre of gravity. Papers describe and evaluate new curricula, redesigned courses, integrated teaching that breaks down subject silos, and curricular materials designed to engage students more effectively. The strongest contributions in this strand do more than announce a change: they explain the educational reasoning behind it, describe implementation honestly, and report outcomes against stated aims, whether examination performance, learner satisfaction measured with a validated instrument, observed clinical skills, or longer-term behaviour. A curriculum paper without evaluation may still be considered if the design itself is novel and described in enough detail for others to adopt, but description plus evidence is the combination the journal's readership values.

Instructional methods form a second strand. The journal's scope materials give examples that have defined its interests since launch: the effectiveness of large didactic lectures compared with small-group learning, the value of independent-learning assessments, and methods to improve effective teaching in the classroom. To those, the published record adds simulation-based education, technology-enhanced learning, online and blended delivery, anatomy teaching with digital tools, and surgical simulation and training — all topics visible in the journal's recent subject profile. Authors comparing teaching formats should report who the learners were, what the comparison condition really involved, and how learning was measured, because vague claims that an innovation was well received do little to help another school decide.

Assessment of students and faculty is a third strand. Assessment drives learning in medicine, so work on examination design, standard setting, objective structured clinical examinations, workplace-based assessment, feedback quality, progression decisions and remediation has direct practical importance. Faculty assessment belongs here too: how teaching is observed, judged and improved, and how educators are developed and recognised. Papers that apply modern validity thinking — asking what interpretation of a score is justified, for what decision — speak to the journal's audience of programme leaders who must defend high-stakes decisions.

Learners, identity and wellbeing have grown in prominence. The journal's topic profile includes diversity and careers in medicine, medical admissions, empathy in education, and stress and burnout among healthcare professionals. Research on professional identity formation, resilience, inclusion, widening participation and the hidden curriculum — the lessons students absorb from institutional culture rather than from the formal syllabus — fits the journal when it is grounded in educational questions and evidence. So does work on interprofessional education, where medical students learn with nursing, pharmacy and allied-health colleagues, reflecting the team-based reality of clinical care.

Article Types

SAGE's submission guidelines for the journal describe a varied article portfolio. Original Research reports studies conducted by the authors and must add to scientific knowledge within the aims and scope. Reviews collate and interpret prior research. Commentaries, limited to about 1,000 words, present the author's original ideas on a specific paper or a widely researched subject rather than merely summarising literature. Editorials, around 800 words, are normally written by the editor-in-chief, deputy or associate editors or guest editors to introduce changes, supplements or new ideas. Letters to the Editor, also around 800 words with a small number of references, offer a short response to a published article. Methodology manuscripts explain a new method or an improvement to an existing one, for example in assessment processes or educational techniques. Special collections on defined themes are also announced by the journal and can be an attractive route when a call matches a manuscript closely.

Choosing the right type matters. A small pilot study dressed as a full research article invites disappointment, while the same work framed honestly as a short report of an innovation, with its limits stated, can be genuinely useful. Authors should read recent examples of their intended type in the journal itself — the best guide to length, structure and tone is the journal's own recent content — and should follow the current SAGE author instructions for formatting, reporting guidelines and declarations.

Open Access, Fees and Waivers

The journal has been open access since 2014. DOAJ lists its licences as CC BY or CC BY-NC, notes that authors do not retain unrestricted copyright and publishing rights under its summary of the journal's terms, and records that the journal checks submissions for plagiarism. The same listing gives an article processing charge of up to 3,000 US dollars and confirms that a waiver policy exists. Those figures are directory data and can change; the authoritative amount for a given manuscript is the one shown in SAGE's current instructions and in the submission system at the time of acceptance. Authors whose institutions hold a SAGE open-access agreement may find the charge covered or reduced, and authors without funds should ask about waivers before submitting rather than after acceptance, so expectations are clear on both sides.

Digital preservation is handled through CLOCKSS and Portico, the two archiving services named in the DOAJ record. That arrangement is part of what distinguishes a stable open-access journal from a website that might disappear: articles remain accessible through the archive even if the publisher's platform changes. Each article carries a DOI, supporting reliable citation and linking, and articles are visible through PubMed Central, which greatly increases discovery by clinicians and educators who search biomedical literature there.

Indexing and Metrics — Reading Them Honestly

SAGE highlights indexing in PubMed Central, DOAJ and the Emerging Sources Citation Index. PubMed Central presence means full texts are searchable and retrievable in the United States National Library of Medicine ecosystem. DOAJ listing confirms that the journal met the directory's open-access and quality criteria at the time of review. ESCI coverage places the journal within the Web of Science Core Collection's emerging tier, from which journals can progress. Authors with institutional requirements should confirm the journal's status in the exact index and year their institution specifies, because coverage lists are updated and a university rule may name a specific database edition.

SAGE's advertising page for the journal listed an impact factor of 2. Treat that as a publisher-advertised figure for a particular Journal Citation Reports year, not a permanent property. Journal-level metrics describe average citation behaviour across many articles; they do not predict whether a particular curriculum study will be read, adopted or cited. The h-index of 45 from the original record tells a similar story of accumulated use. For medical education, practical impact — a curriculum adopted elsewhere, an assessment method reused, a policy changed — can matter more than citation counts, and authors choosing this journal should weigh its specialist readership and open access at least as heavily as any single number.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

SAGE's advertising material listed Mildred López-Cabrera as editor-in-chief. Editorial leadership can change, so authors should confirm the current editor and board on the journal's SAGE page before addressing correspondence. DOAJ describes the review model as anonymous peer review, and SAGE guidelines place the journal within the publisher's standard publication-ethics framework, including expectations that manuscripts are the authors' original work and that permissions for reproduced material are obtained. Education research often involves students as participants, sometimes the authors' own students; editors will expect a clear statement of ethics review, consent arrangements and how power relationships between teacher-researchers and student participants were handled. Papers lacking that statement are vulnerable regardless of their other merits.

DOAJ's listing gives an average of about eight weeks from submission to publication. Averages conceal wide variation: a clean manuscript in a well-served topic may move faster, while a paper needing scarce reviewers or major revision will take longer. Authors can help by suggesting the right article type, writing a precise abstract, and responding to reviews promptly and completely. Reviewers in medical education are usually practising educators reviewing alongside teaching and clinical duties; a manuscript that is clearly structured and honestly limited earns their goodwill.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

The journal suits medical, dental and health-professions educators, curriculum leaders, assessment specialists, educational researchers, and clinicians whose scholarship concerns training. It is a plausible home for multi-institution curriculum evaluations, simulation studies with educational outcomes, admissions and diversity research, faculty-development evaluations, and postgraduate training studies, including work from residency and continuing professional development where the educational design is the focus. Its international authorship means studies from any country's system are welcome when the lessons transfer beyond a single institution, or when a local context is described well enough for outsiders to judge transferability.

A purely clinical study with no educational question belongs elsewhere, as does a curriculum description whose claims outrun its data. Authors seeking the very highest-impact general medical education titles should also recognise the trade-off this journal represents: in return for open access, a defined specialist readership, PubMed Central visibility and a comparatively efficient process, they accept metrics below those of the field's most selective subscription journals. For many programme evaluations and teaching innovations, that is the right exchange, because the readers who can act on the work will actually be able to read it.

Practical Submission Guidance

Start from the journal's page on the SAGE Journals platform and read the current submission guidelines in full. Prepare the manuscript in the file formats SAGE prefers, with clear heading levels. Use the reporting guideline appropriate to the study design where one exists — education studies benefit from the same discipline as clinical research in describing participants, interventions, comparisons and outcomes. Define the educational intervention precisely enough that another school could replicate it: contact hours, facilitator preparation, materials, assessment instruments and costs where relevant. Report response rates for surveys, validation evidence for questionnaires, and the setting in enough detail for readers to judge similarity to their own.

Before submitting, check the basics that most often delay education manuscripts: ethics approval or exemption documented; author contributions and conflicts of interest declared; funding acknowledged; student consent addressed; and references formatted as instructed. Declare any prior presentation or preprint as SAGE policy requires. After publication, share the open-access link through professional networks and repositories your institution maintains — the licence permits wide reuse, and dissemination is part of the point of choosing an open journal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the journal's ISSN? Electronic ISSN 2382-1205, which is also its ISSN-L.

Who publishes it and since when? SAGE Publishing in the United Kingdom has published it since 2016. It was founded in 2014 by Libertas Academica Ltd of New Zealand.

Is it open access? Yes, since 2014, under CC BY or CC BY-NC licences as listed in DOAJ. Articles are archived in CLOCKSS and Portico and carry DOIs.

What does it cost to publish? DOAJ lists an article processing charge of up to 3,000 US dollars with a waiver policy. Confirm the current charge and any institutional agreement with SAGE before submitting.

Where is it indexed? SAGE highlights PubMed Central, DOAJ and the Emerging Sources Citation Index. Verify current coverage in any specific database your institution requires.

How long does publication take? DOAJ gives an average of about eight weeks from submission to publication; individual manuscripts vary with review and revision.

What topics fit best? Curriculum development and evaluation, instructional and simulation-based methods, assessment of students and faculty, admissions, diversity, professional identity, wellbeing and interprofessional education across basic-science, clinical and postgraduate stages.

What are its metrics? The original Journals World record carried an h-index of 45, and SAGE advertising listed an impact factor of 2. Both are time-specific indicators; check the current Journal Citation Reports or Scopus data for the latest figures.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile draws on the journal's DOAJ listing, the ISSN Portal record for ISSN 2382-1205, SAGE's journal and advertising pages and submission guidelines, and the publisher, ISSN and h-index carried in the original Journals World record. Fee and timing figures are attributed to DOAJ as directory data and should be rechecked on SAGE's live pages at submission time. No fact that could not be traced to those sources has been asserted.