Today's Clinical Laboratory occupies a central role in the diagnosis and management of illness, whether it be among hospital inpatients or outpatients, and in the prevention and detection of disease among apparently healthy persons living and working in the community. Its workload is constantly increasing as a consequence of a population that is both growing and aging, a rising proportion of subjects under life-long therapy for chronic diseases, the steady progression of new drugs and novel forms of treatment (transplantation procedures, medical devices) stemming from the activities of the industrial arm of Health Care, and the unwelcome advent of new diseases the most dramatic being the current AIDS pandemic.
To meet these challenges, those whose vocation brings them within the domain of the Clinical Laboratory are required to understand and exploit a wide range of natural and applied sciences, many of which were unheard of a century ago. The educational mind-sets that determine the training of such individuals at the University level are twofold: scientists are required to learn more and more about less and less, while physicians have seen their undergraduate years significantly reduced by comparison with their predecessors in favor of postgraduate training and a future devoted to self-directed learning. How will clinical scientists be able to broaden their narrow primary knowledge base to include the vocabulary, concepts, and information from the various fields of medicine that they require to perform their work? How can laboratory physicians keep pace with the explosive developments taking place in scientific disciplines that directly impact their daily activities?
This Journal was founded to meet the needs of both these constituencies and to establish a bridge between them. The Editorial Staff strive to ensure the inclusion of sufficient introductory background material in each article to allow a non-specialist reader to understand the text that follows. Jargon is excised or liberally defined. Illustrations are encouraged to display in a comprehensible way the inter-relationships of mechanisms, reactions, and pathways under discussion. Emphasis is devoted to the timeliness and completeness of the bibliography, which is intended not merely to support and validate the statements and conclusions of the text, but also to serve as a learning resource.
Reviews are usually solicited from international experts on the advice of a panel of individuals collectively forming the Editorial Advisory Board. However, we are anxious to encourage other authors to submit outlines of proposed reviews to the Editor-in-Chief for consideration, following which a formal invitation may be issued. Primary authors are encouraged to recruit collaborators to help in forging a representative consensus and comprehensive coverage of the selected topic. The adjective “Critical” implies a balanced synthesis of results and conclusions that are frequently contradictory and controversial.
Sound judgment free of individual prejudice should guide the choice of themes and the findings that illustrate them. A single expert is assigned the task of refereeing the paper, and his name appears in the credits. This open process goes a long way towards promoting a fairer review than may be the case when the identity of the referee is concealed by the mask of anonymity. Conversely, no scientist will want his or her name to be associated with an inferior publication. Many of our reviews seriously impact the work of non-laboratory personnel (investigators and educators) in the scientific domains to which they are relevant and are frequently cited in the literature of that specialty.
The emphasis upon “Sciences” generally disqualifies topics of a professional nature (such as instrumentation, quality assurance, and methodology) unless they are based upon novel scientific concepts. Inevitably, not all that we publish will completely fulfill the ambitious criteria that we have stipulated, but it is our belief that most will reach a level of interest, usefulness, and quality sufficient to win them an enviable status in the body of literature upon which the Clinical Laboratory Sciences are based.
