© Oxford University Press 2007.
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FROM THE EDITORS
A New Look for the JournalJournal readers will notice some changes with this issue, the first of 2007. Most of the changes are cosmetic, intended to improve readability while giving the pages a more modern look. They are also reflected in the redesign of JNCI online, http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org.
The most substantive change is an addition to the original research content (Articles and Brief Communications): a summary that we are calling the Context and Caveats box. The summaries, written by the senior editors, are our attempt to make the articles more accessible to lay readers, the media, and scientists in other fields. The Context and Caveats box does not replace the abstract but condenses the message of the manuscript into a simple, clear statement that will help all readers—especially those unfamiliar with the limitations inherent in specific study designs—to quickly grasp the basic information about a study's design, constraints, and implications.
Why add a statement that emphasizes a study's limitations? No study—no matter how well designed, conducted, and analyzed—yields perfect knowledge. An epidemiologic study cannot prove causality or control for all possible confounders; a randomized controlled trial may have an intervention that has been highly customized and is not practical for a broader population. A mouse study with exciting findings may have been performed in a carcinogen-induced model whose relevance to sporadic human cancer is not clear, or a study's conclusions may be based on surrogate endpoints whose ability to predict for health outcomes is unclear. All studies published in JNCI have met our rigorous standards of content and statistical review, so we feel that the signal exceeds the noise in every study we publish. Nevertheless, recognizing and making explicit the noise reduces the chances that a study will be overinterpreted or misinterpreted. Explicit recognition of study strengths and weaknesses is at the core of the scientific method and therefore, we feel, at the core of scientific publishing.
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