Page 36 - NEWSLETTER_36

E.O.E Newsletter | www.huanet.gr
36
country. As I mentioned, it was multidisciplinary with all the sub-domains of Urology, pediatrics, female Urology, stones, minimally-invasive, all of them. We really took off and developed into primarily clinical departments with a strong basic research program to supplement it. We created and recruited people who were interested in that sort of a model and it worked. I was able to recruit the type of people with whom my job was primarily to facilitate and get out of their way because they were “go getters” and “self-starters”. If I recruited the right type of people, they would not need me to be prompting them all the time. We had “superstar people”.
T.S.: You have served for many years as Editor- in-Chief of the Journal of Urology, one of the most respected journals in the field. Could
you describe how your editorial journey began and what you consider your most impactful contributions during your tenure?
Prof. Joseph A. Smith: Thanks for the question, because one of my most satisfying efforts in my career has been my editorial experience and being Editor of the Journal of Urology. I was always interested in publication and in journalism actually, including writing
my own papers and being involved in that. Also, I became involved as an Assistant Editor, Associate Editor and eventually the Editor of the Journal of Urology. That was a career path that I knew I wanted. There are a lot of other aspects of Urology or leadership that were less appealing to me. But being Editor of this journal was something that I very much enjoyed, because I knew how much of an impact it could have on the field. The Journal of Urology, more so than many of the other competing journals in our specialty, is multi- dimensional. We would publish papers from every domain of Urology, which sometimes has an adverse effect on the impact factor. Everybody pays attention to that number and we understood how that worked. If you published a paper frankly on anything other than urological cancer, it would probably take down your impact factor. But we did that and we maintained that we wanted to publish the papers that were ultimately impactful for our patients. Something that I repeated throughout my term as Editor of the journal is that the reason, we're doing this is to help our patients. We want to publish papers that of course help the prestige of the Journal, but more so have practical implications for our patients. I think we were able to do that. Ultimately, that's the reason for medical
ΣΥΝΕΝΤΕΥΞΗ