HIV and ID Observations

I absolutely love the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

It’s easily my second-favorite journal.

(Can you guess my favorite? Perhaps this new “About this blog” section will give you a hint.)

But back to CID — here’s why I love it:

• Great content.  Seems every issue has fascinating studies, usually of great clinical relevance to the field of Infectious Diseases.  In this issue alone, tons of stuff on influenza, but also a randomized trial of cranberry juice for recurrent UTI (negative, oh well), a terrific editorial on MRSA, and the usual smattering of interesting HIV/AIDS studies.
• Lots of it, too.  Plenty to read each month (all kinds of studies, editorials, photo quizes, reviews, letters), and more rolling in all the time electronically.  Each year content from CID is among the top sources for both our ID and HIV Journal Watch newsletters. To quote our Executive Editor in Journal Watch:  AIDS Clinical Care, “Don’t those guys ever sleep?”
• Terrific web site. Could this be the single most user-friendly web site in the business?  I love the way the issues are laid out on-line, with the left panel allowing quick and easy access to specific sections of the journal.
• Wonderful covers. Who knew so much art had an Infectious Diseases theme? Great stuff: Congenital syphilis in a Rembrandt portrait, Elizabeth I smallpox medal, St Sebastian lancing a plague bubo … Seems a graphic rendition of various scourges has been a popular art theme for some time, and CID is there to show us!
• Heavy paper. Well, that used to be a plus — now that I read most of the content on-line, it’s less important to me, but boy the shear heft of both CID and JID just exude quality.

Which brings me to their new publishers, Oxford University Press (OUP), who are taking over from the University of Chicago Press.  According to Sherry Gorbach in his introduction, OUP won the right to publish CID “after a competitive bidding process” — one envisions something like what’s going on right now for Cliff Lee.

Not surprisingly, the new publishers have a new CID web site, and I must say on first glance it’s going to take a bit of getting used to.  The old web site just scanned so easily.  And with this revision, you can’t even click on the cover anymore to find out what it’s about — something I always enjoyed.  (Here’s a nice example, reproduced in the picture above.)

Now I’m sure I’ll get used to it, it’s only been one issue.  And it’s still a great journal.