S A E M
NEWSLETTER
Newsletter of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE The ‘Core Being’ of SAEM In the first President’s Message I wrote in the summer, I told you of the important issues the Board of Directors (BOD) were working on this year. One is related to SAEM funding of research and ‘How to do it and can we do more of it?’ I’d like to address this, especially given Donald M. Yealy, MD the implications of any actions on the Society. To date, SAEM has largely been a ‘self sufficient’ organization. We attract many of our own as members (students through faculty and other interested emergency medical professionals) and depend on their efforts, enthusiasm and ‘volunteerism’. We have created a world-class meeting and journal largely based on our own resources, attracting others (including non-emergency medicine professionals, public health and governmental experts) to create excellent networking and sharing of ideas. We fund ourselves through dues and fees for the meeting, journal and other products, with some help from special drives, including the Research Fund and its predecessor. Through all of these successes, we have advanced our research and education mission, but kept outside influences limited. Many of you comment on this – noting that SAEM is ‘not beholden to industry’ or other such comments. A goal of our organization is to increase the funding of our research training grants. To date, we have done well, creating a balance of nearly $2.4 million to serve this important area. Based on our own analyses, we believe more dollars are needed to create a sustained program capable of creating the next generation of academicians, able to compete favorably at many levels with colleagues in other medical disciplines. We believe that achieving that will require a research fund pool of $8-10 million available within 5-7 years. To get to that goal, we must consider reaching beyond our members, who have and continue to be generous. We have some experience with this – the EMS Fellowship has been sponsored by Physio-Control/Medtronics since its inception, helping train EMS academicians for over a decade. In addition, Astra-Zeneca has sponsored the Neurological Research Fellowship. To help us (the Board of Directors), better understand the path of fundraising, we solicited and evaluated many proposals from experts in the (continued on next page)
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November/December 2003 Volume XV, Number 6
Call for AEM Reviewers Deadline: February 1, 2004 The editors of AEM invite interested SAEM members to submit nominations to serve as peer reviewers for Academic Emergency Medicine. As an indicator of familiarity with the peer-review process, the medical literature, and the research process in general, peerreviewers are expected to have published at least two peer-reviewed papers in the medical literature as first or second author. Some of these papers should be original research work. Alternatively, other scholarly work or experience will be considered as evidence of expertise (i.e., informatics experience demonstrated by network/ database/desktop development). AEM peer-reviewers are invited to review specific manuscripts based on their area(s) of expertise. Once a reviewer has accepted an invitation to review a manuscript, the reviewer is expected to complete the review within 14 days of receipt of the manuscript. In order to provide feedback to reviewers, reviewers receive the consensus review from each manuscript that they review. In addition, each review is evaluated by the decision editor in the areas of timeliness, assessment of manuscript strengths and weaknesses, constructive suggestions, summarizing major issues and concerns, and overall quality of the review. Scores are compiled in the AEM database. Each year the Editor-in-Chief designates Outstanding Reviewers for public acknowledgment of excellent contributions to the peerreview process. Most appointments as peer reviewer are for three years. Reviewers whose consistently fail to respond to request to review, who are unavailable to perform reviews, or who submit later or incomplete reviews may be dropped from the peer reviewer database at any time, at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief. Individuals interested in being considered for appointment as an AEM peer reviewer must send a letter of interest including areas of expertise as defined on the reviewer topic survey and a current CV. The reviewer topic survey can be found at www.saem.org /inform/resurvey.htm. All applications should be submitted electronically to aem@saem.org by February 1, 2004.