Post written by Douglas G. Adler, MD, FACG, AGAF, FASGE, Director, Center for Advanced Therapeutic Endoscopy (CATE), PEAK Gastroenterology, Porter Adventist Hospital, Denver, Colorado, USA.

It is my great pleasure to write to you as the new Editor-in-Chief of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. I enter into this new role with a sense of incredible excitement and optimism for the future, paired with profound humility as well as respect for those who have labored in this role before me in the past.

In 1999 as a first-year GI fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, I was asked by some of my attending physicians (who knew of my then-budding interest in endoscopy) if I would be willing to shadow-write some reviews for GIE that they had agreed to do.

At this point in my career, I knew next to nothing about writing scientific and medical papers, but it seemed like a good opportunity, and I readily accepted. I learned very quickly that reviewing for a medical journal was a chance to “see how the sausage was made” and provided me with valuable insights into study design, data analysis, and manuscript writing that, for all intents and purposes, I simply could not obtain anywhere else.

I was also amazed to see specific recommendations I had made to manuscript authors reflected in the final versions of their articles when they were published in the pages of the journal some months later, showing me firsthand the true value and benefit of the peer-review process.

Eventually, I reached out to GIE directly and became a reviewer for the journal in my own right. I found this to be very sustaining work for many years, essentially never turning down an opportunity to review for the journal and occasionally being lucky enough to be asked to author an editorial (usually on a paper I had reviewed). In 2014, then-incoming Editor-in-Chief, Dr Michael Wallace, graciously asked me to join his team at GIE as an Associate Editor; I could not have said yes to him fast enough.

Over the past 8 years, first as an Associate Editor and then as Senior Associate Editor, I have held a large number of positions with the journal and have worked tirelessly to learn the workings of GIE inside and out, and from top to bottom. In many ways I feel as though I started in the mailroom, so to speak, and I hope to bring the knowledge gleaned over many years to keep the journal fresh, relevant, and seminal to endoscopists worldwide.

Read the full article online.

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