The JCDA of the Future – focused, online and enhanced
At a recent meeting in Ottawa, the Board of the Canadian Dental Association confirmed that the Association is committed to scholarly publishing and voted to continue publication of the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association (JCDA), with a clear focus on original articles that contribute to the body of knowledge of the dental profession. In future, the JCDA will focus solely on publishing original research, comprehensive literature reviews, and proceedings of scholarly meetings. It will continue as an online-only journal on the JCDA.ca site.
In recent years, CDA has created a number of new professional media including CDA Essentials magazine, the Oasis Discussions community of practice site, the CDA Oasis mobile app, the Oasis Help point of care tool, and the CDA Oasis Bulletin and CDA Oasis News Bites email newsletters. These media have been designed to promote the sharing of good existing knowledge in formats that are user-friendly for the busy practitioner.
With all these developments in the area of knowledge exchange, it was important to examine our capacity and commitment to publication of original scholarly material. Making its recent decision, the CDA Board affirmed the particular value its places on working with Canadian dental schools to advance the body of knowledge of the profession.
Clearly, Canadian dental academics have many journals to choose from when it comes to submitting scholarly work for publication, however, the JCDA is important in that it provides a credible, indexed, peer-reviewed journal that is based in Canada. The online JCDA is indexed in Medline and in Journal Citation Reports, where it has a 5-year Impact Factor of 0.947. CDA ceased publishing a print version of the JCDA (& le JADC – the French-language equivalent) in early 2014 when the new CDA Essentials and L’essentiel de l’ADC magazines were launched.
Over the next few months, we will be redesigning the JCDA.ca website to reflect the new focus and we will be launching innovative efforts to encourage Canadian oral health researchers within Canada and beyond our shores, as well as those who collaborate with them to submit manuscripts for review and potential publication.
Please feel free to contact me through the Comment Box to discuss ideas for manuscripts that could fit the scope of the newly focused JCDA. All comments will come to me directly and privately.
I am extremely happy that the JCDA scientific journal is back, as I miss it very much! The magazine didn’t appeal to me as much and besides magazine type articles can still be included in the JCDA journal. Great decision and leadership board!
James Noble
It was an unfortunate decision to discontinue the print version of JCDA. I rarely find myself at jcda.ca. I prefer a print version as I find it convenient to read while on public transit or in many circumstances where I am unable (or unwilling) to access the internet. I now tend to read other print journals such as JADA, BDJ or General Dentistry. In addition, I always found the jcda website cluttered and not intuitive. For example, for archived issues, one has to select “about jcda” first. Why not simply have a tab that says “archived issues” as many other publications do? In addition, dividing tabs into “research” and “clinical dentistry” seems odd. How about research that answers a clinical question and has a clinical application?
Those are my thoughts. Please return the print journal!