Pursuing Quality

Peer-reviewed Reports in Medical Education Research (PRiMER) is approaching the 10-year mark since the first articles were published in 2017,¹ and we recently passed a decade since we began receiving submissions in August of 2016. From the beginning, we maintained a quality guide² as part of our author resources, and we have used the concepts in those guidelines to strive for rigor—to make PRiMER not only a place for new scholars to enter their work into the literature, but also to do so in a journal that ensures quality in study design, execution, and reporting.

Along the way, we have modified and added new considerations to our quality guidelines, and also have become more experienced in enforcing guidelines that require professional judgement. Every study, and every report, is different. However, with every decision, the editorial management team (the editor-in-chief, associate editors, production manager, staff, and interns) commits to exercising its best judgement, application of the quality guidelines, and scrutiny of the reports we review.

This commitment to quality has produced results. PRiMER was accepted for inclusion in PubMed Central in 2022, after more than a yearlong process of review.³ In 2024, we took a public stance on self-assessment and self-reported confidence as proxies for objective measurement of skill or knowledge attainment, and have stuck to this standard, including it in our guidelines and editorial processes during manuscript review.⁴ In 2025, we reported the results of several years of tracking of reviewer responsiveness (which directly impacts quality),⁵ and also began identifying and publicly reporting misuse of artificial intelligence in manuscript preparation.⁶ These and other efforts underscore our commitment to quality.

Of course, one of the hallmarks of quality for a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal is inclusion in research databases, like PubMed Central. The evaluation process for these is rigorous, and often challenges the applicant journal to answer for what it produces, and the processes it employs to produce scholarly content. We gradually and continually apply for inclusion in new databases and indexes, as part of that commitment to quality, and willingness to be held up to scrutiny.

I am happy to report that PRiMER will now be included in the SCOPUS⁷ database, after a long review, and that we have other applications pending as well. Content from 2022 forward should be available there shortly. As a result of this and other reviews by journal databases, however, we uncovered a few errors that, unfortunately, happen in publication. This leads to my final point – part of a commitment to quality includes a willingness to correct mistakes, transparently and openly. Alongside this editorial, PRiMER is publishing its first  statements of error in published articles, alongside corrections to those articles. This is standard practice within academic publishing, as outlined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).⁷ Rather than shying away from the opportunity to disclose errors, we embrace the opportunity to, once again, commit to the quality of the content published in PRiMER.

As the journal’s audience of medical educators knows, quality is not a static goal, but an ongoing process. Accountability, transparency, and a willingness to improve are all a part of a commitment to continually strive for better. The journal’s first errata demonstrate our willingness to submit to scrutiny, and strive to produce the best research that we can.