About JRSM Short Reports

JRSM Short Reports

JRSM Short Reports was an online-only, open access, peer-reviewed companion journal to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM), published in London from June 2010 to December 2013 under ISSN 2042-5333. Launched by the Royal Society of Medicine to publish the sound clinical papers and case reports that its flagship journal could not accommodate, it accepted work in any specialty and from any country, required articles to be shorter than 3,000 words with no more than 30 references and four tables or figures, and was succeeded in 2014 by JRSM Open, which continued the same companion role under a new name. Its complete run — volume 1, number 1 (June 2010) to volume 4, number 12 (2013) — remains part of the scholarly record and is preserved in PubMed Central.

Overview and Introduction

JRSM Short Reports existed to solve a specific editorial problem. By the late 2000s, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine — the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in London, with a publication lineage reaching back through the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine to the early nineteenth century — was receiving far more sound manuscripts, especially case reports and focused clinical studies, than a monthly print journal could publish. Its editor, Kamran Abbasi, set out the answer in a 2010 editorial in JRSM itself: a new online-only, open access sister journal that could publish articles of interest to almost any reader concerned with improving patient care, judged principally on whether the research question was relevant to its intended audience, whether the methods were reliable, and whether anything important had been omitted.

That editorial philosophy is what makes JRSM Short Reports historically interesting beyond its short run. It was an early, explicit statement of the soundness-based publishing model that later became familiar across scholarly publishing: instead of rationing space by predicted importance alone, an online journal lets readers decide what is of interest to them, while editors and referees police relevance, reliability and completeness. Print publication, Abbasi argued, forces editors to decide on the basis of what they judge readers will want; online publication allows readers to decide for themselves. JRSM Short Reports was the Royal Society of Medicine's practical experiment with that principle, launched in June 2010.

The JournalsWorld record for this post is identified by ISSN 2042-5333, and the ISSN Portal record for that number gives the formal skeleton of the journal: title proper JRSM short reports, variant title Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine short reports, medium online, earliest publisher Royal Society of Medicine Press in London for 2010–2013 in that record's summary, latest publisher SAGE Publications, issuing body the Royal Society of Medicine (Great Britain), frequency monthly, dates of publication 2010–2013, status ceased, and the run described as volume 1, number 1 (June 2010) to volume 4, number 12 (2013). Library cataloguing adds the publishing detail that the journal was issued by RSM Press until September 2012 and by SAGE from October 2012, reflecting SAGE's takeover of the RSM journals programme in that period.

History: Launch, Run and Renaming

The journal was announced in JRSM in 2010 in two editorials that bookend its launch. In "JRSM Short Reports – a new online journal sister to JRSM", Kamran Abbasi explained that more and more research and case reports would be published in online-only, open access publications asking authors to pay a publication fee, that such journals were meeting the needs of authors and readers, and that demand for publication in JRSM had risen beyond what the flagship could carry. The new journal would publish articles in any specialty and from any country; its peer review would mirror that of JRSM, with an editor first evaluating each paper and immediately rejecting unsuitable ones; and its difference in emphasis was breadth of interest — where JRSM sought articles of interest to a broad range of United Kingdom clinicians, Short Reports would publish articles of interest to almost any reader interested in improving patient care. Accepted articles would receive light technical editing, and authors would have to meet strict format limits: shorter than 3,000 words, no more than 30 references, and no more than four tables or figures.

Publication began in June 2010. A follow-up feature, "From JRSM Short Reports", published in JRSM in 2010 and preserved in PubMed Central, describes the journal in the same terms — a new, online-only, peer-reviewed, open access companion journal to JRSM, launched in June 2010, intended to develop into a leading international online resource of clinical papers and case reports on all aspects of improving patient care, with authors paying a small fee for published articles to cover production costs and to keep articles freely released to readers. It also records the operational details of the time: the journal's own website, a Manuscript Central submission route, and editorial enquiries directed to Abbasi as editor of both JRSM and JRSM Short Reports. Articles published in Short Reports were also mentioned in the print edition of JRSM, a cross-promotion that gave online articles a presence in the society's established print channel.

The journal ran monthly for three and a half years: four volumes, ending with volume 4, number 12 in December 2013. Its content in that period ranged across the whole of clinical medicine, as its scope promised — the article indexes for the journal record hundreds of items including case reports, clinical studies, reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, clinical trials and editorials, with DOIs first in a 10.1258/shorts pattern under RSM Press and later in the SAGE 10.1177/20425333 pattern built from the journal's ISSN.

The end of the title was a renaming, not a failure. Writing in JRSM in late 2013, in an editorial preserved in PubMed Central (PMCID PMC3883157), Abbasi explained that JRSM had an open access companion publication for articles that JRSM could not accommodate but that were of interest to clinicians, and that from 2014 the name of that companion journal would change from JRSM Short Reports to JRSM Open, to better reflect the opportunities it offered authors for open access publishing — while the nature and variety of articles published by JRSM Open would remain unchanged. Library records formalise the same succession: JRSM Short Reports ceased with volume 4, number 12 (December 2013), and its succeeding title is JRSM Open. Anyone searching for where this journal went should therefore look to JRSM Open, and anyone citing its articles should cite them under the original title, JRSM Short Reports, with its original volume, year and DOI.

Scope and Article Types

The scope was deliberately generalist: articles in any specialty, from any country, on any aspect of improving patient care. In practice the journal's centre of gravity was the short clinical paper and the case report — forms that flagship general journals often decline for space reasons even when the work is sound and useful. Its indexed content includes original research, case reports, clinical studies and trials, reviews and systematic reviews, meta-analyses, classical articles, comments, editorials, guidelines and letters, which is the full working range of a general medical journal rather than a single-format case-report outlet.

The format limits were part of the identity. A ceiling of under 3,000 words, 30 references and four tables or figures forced the concision that the title advertised: these were short reports, designed to be read quickly by clinicians, and the limit structure is one reason the archive remains approachable. Authors whose work needed extensive methods, large reference lists or many displays would have been directed, in effect, toward the flagship journal or another full-length outlet instead.

Two examples from its first months, listed in JRSM's own summary of the journal's June and July 2010 content, illustrate the range: a study of whether mixing acute medical admissions with burn patients increased infective complications in paediatric thermal injuries; an analysis of the impact of article titles on citation hits across general and specialist medical journals; a study of what matters to patients in perceptions of quality; research on factors influencing foundation programme choice among medical students; a comparison of phenol concentrations in pilonidal sinus disease; and a historical re-evaluation of the diagnosis of porphyria cutanea tarda in a nineteenth-century admiral. Clinical audit, medical education, health services research, surgical technique and medical history all sat inside the same journal — exactly the eclectic, patient-care-centred mix its launch editorial had promised.

Peer Review and Editorial Model

The review process mirrored JRSM's. An editor initially evaluated each submission, unsuitable papers were rejected immediately without external review, and the remainder were sent for expert review. The criteria applied were stated plainly: the relevance of the research question to the audience the paper was intended for, the reliability of the methods, and any important omissions. This is a soundness-and-relevance standard rather than a novelty standard, and it was applied by the same editorial leadership as the flagship — Abbasi was editor of both journals — which kept the companion's standards visibly tied to the society's main title.

Accepted articles went through a light technical editing process, with authors required to conform to the journal's technical and production requirements in the final version. That combination — firm format limits at submission, light touch editing after acceptance — is characteristic of the first generation of online-only medical journals, which traded elaborate production for speed and openness. Authors or historians looking for the current equivalent process should consult JRSM Open, the successor, rather than assuming that the 2010–2013 arrangements still apply unchanged.

Open Access and Fees

JRSM Short Reports was open access from its launch: online-only, freely readable, and funded by a publication fee paid by authors of accepted articles to cover production costs. The launch-era description calls it a small fee; no exact fee figure is stated in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is invented here — the historic fee schedule is not publicly disclosed in a verifiable form in those sources, and in any case a 2010–2013 fee would be of historical interest only. What matters for the record is the model: this was author-pays gold open access, adopted by a learned society publisher at a time when that model was still new enough to need explaining to readers in an editorial.

The articles' preservation in PubMed Central gives the archive a durable public home. The 2010 and 2011 JRSM features describing the journal, and many of the journal's own articles, are held in PMC with stable PMCID identifiers, which means the run can still be read and cited through the United States National Library of Medicine's systems as well as through the publisher's platform and Crossref DOI resolution.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

No Journal Impact Factor, CiteScore or SCImago quartile is claimed for JRSM Short Reports in this profile, because none could be verified from an authoritative source in the research for it: the journal's run ended in 2013, before several current metric products took their present form, and secondary metric sites do not provide a reliable record for this title. Its verifiable standing rests on other evidence: it was the official companion of one of Britain's leading general medical journals; it was issued by the Royal Society of Medicine, one of the United Kingdom's principal medical societies; its content was indexed in the biomedical literature systems that carry PMC content; and its articles accumulated several hundred indexed items across four volumes — one article index records 331 items for the journal.

That absence of a modern metric should not be read as a judgement on quality. Short-lived companion titles of society journals commonly lack the long citation windows that metric products reward, and the journal's purpose — rapid, open publication of sound short clinical work — was never primarily a citation-maximising one. Researchers citing its content today should cite the article, not the journal's metrics: the individual papers, with their DOIs and PMC records, are the durable scholarly objects.

Relationship to JRSM and JRSM Open

Three titles need to be kept distinct. The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) is the flagship: a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal published by SAGE for the Royal Society of Medicine, with print ISSN 0141-0768 and online ISSN 1758-1095, and a lineage through the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine back to the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions of the early 1800s. JRSM Short Reports (ISSN 2042-5333) was its open access companion from 2010 to 2013. JRSM Open is the same companion continued under a new name from 2014, with the same nature and variety of articles, according to the editorial that announced the change. Short Reports is therefore neither the flagship nor a separate unrelated journal: it is the middle name in the companion journal's own history, and catalogue records that link the three titles in that order are correct.

For authors, the practical consequence is simple: JRSM Short Reports cannot accept submissions, because it ceased under that title at the end of 2013. A short clinical paper or case report of the kind it published should now be considered for JRSM Open, under that journal's current instructions, or for JRSM itself if it meets the flagship's broader-interest standard. For readers and librarians, the 2010–2013 archive under ISSN 2042-5333 remains a citable, preserved part of the record.

Using the Archive Today

For a present-day reader, the most useful way to approach JRSM Short Reports is as a compact, self-contained archive of early open access clinical publishing. Because the whole run covers only four volumes, a researcher can survey an entire field's contribution to the journal — every case report in a specialty, for example, or every medical education paper it carried — in a way that would be impossible with a century-old flagship title. Its articles remain individually citable by DOI, many are readable in full through PubMed Central, and the journal's own listing features in JRSM in 2010 and 2011 provide a contemporary guide to its earliest content. When a citation to the journal appears in a modern paper, it refers to work published between 2010 and 2013; a citation dated after 2013 under this title would be an error, since later companion-journal articles belong to JRSM Open, and checking the title against the year is a quick way to validate a reference list.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of JRSM Short Reports? 2042-5333, its online ISSN and ISSN-L.

Who published JRSM Short Reports? The Royal Society of Medicine, through RSM Press until September 2012 and SAGE Publications from October 2012, per library records; the ISSN record names SAGE as latest publisher.

When did it publish? Monthly from June 2010 (volume 1, number 1) to December 2013 (volume 4, number 12).

Was it peer reviewed? Yes. Its process mirrored JRSM's: initial editor assessment, immediate rejection of unsuitable papers, and expert review for the rest, judged on relevance, reliability of methods and important omissions.

Was it open access? Yes, online-only and open access, funded by an author publication fee toward production costs. The exact historic fee could not be verified and is not stated here.

What happened to the journal? It was renamed JRSM Open from 2014, with the nature and variety of its articles stated to remain unchanged.

What did it publish? Short clinical papers and case reports in any specialty and from any country, plus research, reviews, systematic reviews, trials, editorials and letters, limited to under 3,000 words, 30 references and four tables or figures.

Who edited it? Kamran Abbasi, editor of JRSM, was also editor of JRSM Short Reports, per the journal's launch-era records.