Chapter 22: Editorial Positions: Cancer and Other Publications
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Description
In this Chapter, Dr. Pollock describes his role as editor-in-chief of the American Cancer Society’s journal, Cancer, a position he was nominated for and held from 2000-2011. He task was to bring the journal back from some “hard times,” and he notes that the American Cancer Society was pleased with what he accomplished. Under his leadership, Cancer became one of the first biomedical journals to accept submissions electronically. Dr. Pollock notes some of the surgical oncology manuals and textbooks he has editing and explains that editing and writing are another outlet for his educational impulses.
Identifier
PollokRE_03_20121119-C22
Publication Date
11-19-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Raphael Pollock, MD, Oral History Interview, November 19, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The AdministratorContributions Activities Outside InstitutionCareer and Accomplishments
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I didn’t want to neglect to ask you about your role as editor of Cancer. It kind of feels like we’re moving away from the [sublime?] after our conversation. I just wanted to ask a few extra questions. You were editor of Cancer from 2000-2011, so I wanted to ask you about that editorial role. Also, I know you were very involved in developing some digital mechanisms, so just a comment maybe on the digitization of publishing.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, Cancer was one of the first journals to move from manual snail mail manuscript submission to a totally electronic submission process, and it happened during the first two years that I was the editor-in-chief of Cancer. There were a lot of hiccups, as you can well imagine, but at the end of the day it was a really, really neat way of sending manuscripts. Once you had used it once as either a reviewer or as a submitter, you quickly realized how powerful this was as a way of transmitting information—the rapidity with which responses could be generated and so forth. So that was fun. And to just broaden that part of my career a little bit, I’ve had the opportunity to serve as the oncology editor for the Schwartz Principles of Surgery, which is one of the most widely utilized surgery textbooks among medical students and residents in the United States. Also, I’ve had the chance to serve as the surgical oncology editor of the Holland-Frei’s Cancer Medicine textbook, which likewise is a very, very popular oncology textbook. We’ve edited the Manual of Clinical Oncology for the UICC, which is an international organization. So the editing and writing and responsibilities that I’ve had the privilege of enjoying have been yet another outlet. It’s not quite as dramatic or as tangible as the one-to-one education in the clinic that we’ve talked about, but you certainly can see how you impact other people and their understanding of the disease albeit at times in a more indirect fashion. But people will come up to you at meetings and thank you for having written this chapter or that chapter, and that’s fun. That’s fun to see that what you’ve done has actually been read by someone else and that it’s had an impact.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Always nice to know you have an audience.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah. That’s right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Being editor of Cancer for a decade, were there certain changes that you saw in interests, or was there a particular mission that you had as editor? Can you talk to me about that?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah. The journal Cancer had actually come on to some hard times with the emergence of several other very good, more general oncology journals. It had undergone competitive processes for about a decade and had actually not faired very well. Some of that was because of how the editorial process was structured, which was one of the reasons I wanted to bring the electronic submission process in as quickly as possible because I knew that that would be a huge competitive advantage—where there would be a window of competitive advantage that would close very quickly once other journals started moving in the same direction, which actually was the case.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So did Cancer go to electronic submissions earlier than others?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Very early. It was one of the first biomedical journals to do so—if not the first, one of the first.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I hadn’t realized that.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
So there was that. We had to make some decisions about how the process was organized. When I took over the journal, the editorial board had over 150 members, and many of these were people who were definitely not current any longer. I made a decision to totally reorganize the editorial board and the structure. For the people that I really thought were no longer in a position to contribute directly, we created what we call the Editorial Advisory Board, which was more for emeritus people. We took the editorial board and parsed it into either specific diseases or specific disciplines, and we had about twenty such people. Then I went out and tried to identify the very best young people in the United States who were the associate-professor-to-early-full-professor part of their career such that their career was definitely on the exponential rise and asked them to serve as section editor with the understanding that I would be very comfortable and would back them 100 percent when a manuscript came across their desk. If they felt that it should be rejected, it would be rejected. If they wanted to accept it without any additional review, it would be accepted without additional review. If they wanted to send it out for more formal review, that would be fine too. In other words, it was more of the sort of executive committee model that I believe so fervently in—attract really good people, give them the opportunity and the responsibility and the resources, and then get the heck out of the way so they can do the job that you’ve asked them to do and don’t take credit for what they’ve done. If they run into difficulties, you work with them behind closed doors to fix those problems, but giving them that sense of ownership. And I encouraged the editors to go to meetings and solicit manuscripts out of young presenters that they thought would have good papers. We periodically would have an issue of the journal that was just devoted to whatever the section editors wanted to put in of their own, be it their own research, a review article. Those were very popular. There is a former pathologist at Sloan-Kettering, a man named Steven Hadju—Hungarian immigrant who is also an antiquarian book collector of professional renown. I went to Steve, he was a friend of mine, and said, “Would you like to write a series on the history of cancer medicine?” So periodically we would have a paper on that. We opened up a new translational reviews section. So there were a lot of things that were done, and I was very happy that the predecessors who had been the editorial board, by and large, were very, very comfortable with the transition. The impact factor went from two to its current near six level, and I think that a lot of the luster of the journal was restored over that period of time. I’ve had certainly the feedback I got from the American Cancer Society. They were very, very gratified by the changes and what the team had been able to put together. I was happy that one of my section editors ultimately was able to move into the editor-in-chief role. That was a man named Fadlo Khuri, who was at Emory. He was at MD Anderson for the first ten years of his career, so he is sort of an old Anderson person by extension as well. Those were some of the creative things that the editor-in-chief role enabled me to do. The American Cancer Society was also excellent to work with because they had very, very good in-house professional publications people. It was working with a very, very solid professional team.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did you get that role?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
I was nominated and then selected by the Board of Trustees of the Cancer Society.
Recommended Citation
Pollock, Raphael E. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 22: Editorial Positions: Cancer and Other Publications" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1334.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1334
Conditions Governing Access
Open
