The journal was established in 1883 by the American Medical Association and superseded the Transactions of the American Medical Association. Councilor's Bulletin was renamed the Bulletin of the American Medical Association, which later was absorbed by the Journal of the American Medical Association. In 1960, the journal obtained its current title, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. The journal is commonly referred to as JAMA.
Continuing Education Opportunities for Physicians was a semiannual journal section providing lists for regional or national levels of continuing medical education. Between 1937 and 1955, the list was produced either quarterly or semiannually. Between 1955 and 1981, the list was available annually, as the number of CME offerings increased from 1,000 to 8,500. In 2016, CME transitioned into a digital offering from the JAMA Network called JN Learning CME & MOC from JAMA Network. JN Learning provides CME and MOC credit from article and audio materials published within all 12 JAMA Network journals, including JAMA.
On 11 July 2016, JAMA published an article by Barack Obama entitled, , which was the first academic paper ever published by a sitting U.S. president. The article was not subject to blind peer-review. It argued for specific policies that future presidents could pursue in order to improve national health carereform implementation.
Policy shift
After the controversial 1999 firing of an editor-in-chief, George D. Lundberg, a process was put in place to ensure editorial freedom. A seven-member journal oversight committee was created to evaluate the editor-in-chief and to help ensure editorial independence. Since its inception, the committee has met at least once a year. Presently, JAMA policy states that article content should be attributed to authors, not to the publisher.
Artwork
From 1964 to 2013, the JAMA journal used images of artwork on its cover and it published essays commenting on the artwork. According to former editor George Lundberg, this practice was designed to link the humanities and medicine. In 2013, a format redesign moved the art feature to an inside page, replacing an image of the artwork on the cover with a table of contents. The purpose of the redesign was to standardize the appearance of all journals in the JAMA Network.
Previous chief editors
The following persons have been editor-in-chief of JAMA:
Abstracting and indexing
The JAMA journal is abstracted and indexed in: According to Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2019 impact factor of 45.540, ranking it 3rd out of 165 journals in the category "Medicine, General & Internal".
Use
In the first quarter of 2020 JAMA was one of the most popular and reliable journal in sources of Wikipedia.
