In the halls of national meetings where psychiatric educators gather, there has been grumbling for some years now about the paucity of articles on psychiatric education published in psychiatry's premier journal, the American Journal of Psychiatry. Many of our colleagues have speculated that the advent of a new editor of that journal, whose career has been more focused on scientific research than her predecessor's, was responsible for this perceived change. These perceptions piqued our own scientific curiosity. Accordingly, we undertook a small study. Our hypothesis was that there would be a statistically significant difference between education-related articles published under the stewardship of the previous editor than under the current one. We counted the number of articles indexed under "education, psychiatric," "education, medical student," or "academic psychiatry" (eliminating duplications) each year in the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) since the change in editorship, and for an equal number of years prior to the change. Table 1 shows the results.

We found our hypothesis was not supported by the data. So much for the validity of educators' (including our own) perceptions. But we did not allow the question to die there. Inspection of our data and a quick look back at indices of the AJP from the early 1980s confirmed that, once upon a time, AJP had published many more educationally oriented articles. So the question became, when did the change occur? And why?

By extending our method to previous years, it became clear that 1989 was a watershed year. This happened to be the year the old Journal of Psychiatric Education was overhauled, revamped, and renamed Academic Psychiatry. As illustrated by Table 2, you will see the change in the number of education-related articles published in AJP in the pre- vs. postincarnations of this journal.

As we often remind our contributors, correlations do not imply causation. Nonetheless, we feel a certain pride with these findings, suggesting a possible impact of one journal on the publication practices of another. While as educators we are still not delighted with the significant decrease in the number of articles on psychiatric education published in the AJP, we and our sponsoring organizations, the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry, can feel a certain satisfaction with the likelihood that this journal seems to have had a demonstrable impact on the field. The credit for this clearly goes to our predecessors, Drs. Jonathan Borus, William Sledge, and Philip Slavney. Their efforts created a new level of sophistication and respect for scholarly educational endeavors.

We hope that this exercise will reinforce to our readership the value and importance of using data to evaluate one's opinions. As professional educators so often admonish us, evaluation should be built into all of our activities, from the initial planning stages to the final results.