• medical education
• medical journalism

Most people working in healthcare undergo regular appraisal. The frequency of this depends on your profession, where you practice, and what sort of role you have. As a consultant in the UK the bare minimum, required for professional registration, is yearly, and every 5 years you need to undergo revalidation, a process in which the General Medical Council assures itself that you’re OK to continue in practice. At the time of writing I’ve just undergone appraisal prior to my revalidation, and it struck me that a medical journal—as a living entity—might need to have regular appraisal too. Actually, I suspect we already do it in some ways.

We do look at data, to check that we’re serving a purpose. We use standard metrics like downloads of our articles and unique page visits. Some of the papers you read and write are seen thousands of times. It’s harder to monitor the …