Cleveland Clinic Pulmonologist Elected to Lead Prestigious Medical Journal

Peter J. Mazzone, MD, MPH, FCCP, staff and Director of the Lung Cancer Program and Lung Screening Program in Cleveland Clinic’s Respiratory Institute, was recently named editor-in-chief of the prestigious pulmonary medicine journal, CHEST.

The publication’s vision, like the American College of Chest Physicians, is to provide clinically relevant research and patient management guidance to pulmonary medicine physicians worldwide. “It’s certainly an honor and privilege to be given the opportunity to help support and guide that vision,” says Dr. Mazzone.

Prioritizing high-impact research

For his part, his goal is to provide content for readers that can be easily translated into clinical practice, and that means prioritizing the highest quality research. “We realize that authors have a choice of where they would like to send their articles. Our goal is to foster partnership and outreach that will lead to an increased focus on competitive submissions of high-impact research.”

Part of this goal is making submission to the journal a straightforward process, wherein authors receive timely, thorough feedback from journal reviewers. There will also be an emphasis on transparency. If a manuscript is rejected, efforts will be made to provide substantive guidance to authors so they may improve their work over time. One strategy to achieve this includes a new editorial format that will highlight different types of research and provide a more comprehensive framework to guide authors and reviewers.

Dr. Mazzone built an editorial team that includes nine subspecialty leaders who have recruited top clinicians and researchers across each area to serve. The board represents a geographically diverse leadership—with members from 12 countries and nearly 80 institutions around the world. “By having these teams with subspecialty expertise, we hope to be a step ahead in understanding what’s going on and what we should be bringing to our audience,” he remarks.

There will also be an emphasis on complementing traditional content with digital media, including video summaries, visual abstracts, discussions with authors and more. While these enhancements reflect a shift in publishing across the industry, Dr. Mazzone hopes this will also further cultivate discourse within the respiratory and critical care academic communities and encourage authors to access and create content in new ways.

Finally, the editorial board has also welcomed a statistical editor, Michael Kattan, PhD, Chair of Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Qualitative Health Sciences in the Lerner Research Institute. “He’s built a great team of statisticians who help with our reviews. We thought it was important to incorporate deep statistical knowledge to balance the exceptional clinical knowledge in our review process,” he notes. “It has already proved to be an asset to the reviews we provide and the quality of articles we publish.”

Dr. Mazzone has been a member of CHEST since 1999 and has served in a number of leadership positions within the organization. His inaugural issue as editor-in-chief was published in July 2019.