Quality has no boundaries

The new year has arrived bringing with it new expectations of success. It gives us the opportunity to reflect on 2013 and plan for the year ahead. We hope you enjoyed the new web journal www.bjui.org that we have introduced. It has certainly increased our full paper downloads each month which means that our readers do care. Thank you! Your loyalty makes the many hours of hard work – 24/7 – all worthwhile. We have an international team which allows someone, somewhere to be making constant improvements to the BJUI for your reading pleasure.

Many of our readers while congratulating us, commented that perhaps we had focussed on being of greater relevance to the younger generation. Imagine my surprise when at a recent Men’s Health meeting in London, my old chief came up to me for a discussion about the controversies of PSA testing following publication of the AUA guidelines [1] and a consensus statement from down under on blogs@BJUI [2]. He had read it all on the web much earlier than when these articles eventually make it to the print journal. Like him, many of our readers see and read an article or blog online but do not necessarily comment on it. As a new metric, we will start indicating the number of times an article is read in addition to the number of comments it receives.

At the BJUI we do not make New Years resolutions. It is much easier to act. During our editorial board meeting last October it became obvious that we were receiving high quality papers from all over the world. In this issue, we have the great pleasure of showcasing a superb article on circumcision from Uganda [3]. Men with or without HIV, which is highly prevalent in Africa, tend to heal well after circumcision. This does not appear to be affected by their CD4 counts. This is a large study, relevant to all urologists and I would urge you to read it and the accompanying editorial from Paul Hegarty [4].

This article also gave us the idea of highlighting the geographical location of the article of the month on the front cover. Another inspirational concept from Tet Yap our associate editor for design. More about that in coming editions.

Finally Maxine Sun is back with a SEER study showing that the extent of lymphadenectomy during radical nephrectomy in patients with nodal metastasis, does not affect survival. Like any database, missing entries may have confounded the results and it is critical from a scientific standpoint to understand the resultant bias [5]. For those wishing to learn health services research a good starting point is to read the Sun Blog on SEER at our web journal.

Here’s looking forward to interacting with you in 2014.

Prokar Dasgupta
Editor in Chief, BJUI

Guy’s Hospital, King’s Health Partners

References

Ballentine Carter H. American Urological Association (AUA) Guideline on prostate cancer detection: process and rationale. BJU Int 2013; 112: 543–547
Murphy D. The Melbourne Consensus Statement on Prostate Cancer Testing. blogs@BJUI. Available at: https://www.bjuinternational.com/bjui-blog/the-melbourne-consensus-statement-on-prostate-cancer-testing/. Accessed 20 November 2013
Kigozi G, Musoke R, Kighoma N et al. Male circumcision wound healing in HIV-negative and HIV-positive men in Rakai, Uganda. BJU Int 2014; 113: 127–132
Hegarty P. Circumcision – follow up or not? BJU Int 2014; 113: 2
Sun M, Trinh Q-D, Bianchi M et al. Extent of lymphadenectomy does not improve the survival of patients with renal cell carcinoma and nodal metastases: biases associated with the handling of missing data. BJU Int 2014; 113: 36–42

Original publication of this editorial can be found at: BJU Int 2014; 113: 1. doi: 10.1111/bju.12575