Composition of the editorial boards of leading medical education journals

The editorial boards of the three leading medical education journals according to their impact factor were retrieved from the respective January issue of the year 2003. We evaluated in which countries the editorial board members were based and classified these countries using the World Bank income criteria.Individuals from a number of countries can be found on the editorial boards of the investigated journals, but most of them are based in high-income countries.The percentage of editorial board members which are based in developing world countries is higher for the leading medical education journals than in most of their psychiatry and general medicine counterparts. But it is still too low.A recently published article showed that researchers from the developing world contribute only a limited proportion to the total research output published in leading medical education journals [1]. In addition to less research being done in these countries, other likely reasons for this limited number of publications are poor research methods and problems of presentation such as writing style and language competency [2,3]. According to a recent survey researchers from less-developed countries believe that another reason is a substantial editorial bias against their work [3]. As a first step towards examining the objective basis for this claim researchers from the WHO examined the composition of the editorial boards of leading psychiatry journals and found an under-representation of individuals from low-income and middle-income countries [2]. General medical journals follow the same patterns as their psychiatry counterparts [4]. Medical education is one of the most important fields of medicine, because it shapes the future of our profession. Therefore, the discussion how international leading journals in this field really are is of particular importance. As a first step towards obtaining an objective basis for further discussion we recently investigated the geographical distributio