School of Medicine launches Missouri Health journal

This Spring, the MU School of Medicine launched Missouri Health, an online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, featuring published scholarly works from students, residents, fellows and faculty. In its first edition, abstracts were showcased from the 2022 Health Sciences Research Day.

W. David Arnold, MD, executive director of the NextGen Precision Health initiative will serve as the inaugural editor-in-chief, and fourth-year medical student Jay Devineni will serve as the lead managing editor. Devineni will take over the managing editor duties from Jiji Oufattole, who played a pivotal role in the journal’s debut issue.

Three MU medical students serve on the journal’s editorial team, consisting of Devineni, and third-year medical students Sabrina Genovese and Anne Marker. Additionally, a faculty representative from each department in the School of Medicine will serve on the editorial review board.

“Missouri Health is an accessible platform for medical students and researchers to showcase and disseminate their work," said Arnold. "Our mission is to bridge the gap between medicine, medical education and research. In the constantly evolving field of medicine, this journal will help empower the next generation of physicians, physician-scientists and researchers to advance translational medicine.”

The new journal was launched as a way to promote and amplify the exciting research taking place at MU’s medical school, specifically from students. To further engage students, the Missouri Health journal editorial team announced a school-wide logo competition in 2022, with the final design coming from Genovese.

“At that time, we knew the title and theme of Missouri Health, but we asked how that could be properly encompassed within a small logo image,” said Genovese. “I thought it was important to include a representation of everyone on the care team: physicians, nurses and pharmacists. All the images surrounding the human body show how all of these specialties and subspecialities, and all the actions going on both in and outside of a hospital, are patient centered.”

Future issues are already in the works by the editorial team. For the second issue, readers can expect to see an even larger array of abstracts from events such as 2023 Health Sciences Research Day, 2024 Ellis Fischel Cancer Center Research Day, 2024 NextGen PATHWAYS Symposium, and research days at CoxHealth and Mercy in Springfield, Missouri.

For Devineni and his peers, the ability to contribute to an in-house journal like Missouri Health is an opportunity he knows many will take advantage of.

“As a student, submitting your work for publication can be a daunting and expensive process that often ends in rejection,” said Devineni. “I believe it’s an incredible opportunity for MU students to have a journal like this where they can submit their high-quality work free of charge. When you combine this open-access model with peer reviewers who are some of the top experts in their field, you create a journal that is both highly accessible to student researchers and highly edifying for readers.”