The first journal - Asthma in General Practice - 1996-2000

The first journal - 'Asthma in General Practice' - 1996 - June 2000

By 1992, the GPIAG had increased in size and influence and was attracting 70-80 delegates to its Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM). The society had its own membership publication, ‘Asthma in General Practice’, produced by an external publishing agency, first published in 1993 as a once or twice-yearly hard copy newsletter but which also contained abstracts of some of the research and audit work presented by members at the ASM. Much of the work presented at the ASM was valuable, but there was little opportunity to publish it in full in the established respiratory journals at the time, which were very much secondary-care focussed. 

Therefore, in 1996, the Steering Committee of the GPIAG under its new chairman Dermot Ryan invited Mark Levy to become the editor of Asthma in General Practice. Mark was given the task of attracting submissions of high quality research papers, establishing a peer review system, and turning the journal into an academic journal of record. He recruited an Editorial Board of four people who subsequently became Assistant Editors – Chris Griffiths, John Haughney, Robert McKinley and Paul Stephenson. By March 1998, the journal had been accepted onto two important scientific databases – BIOSIS and EMBASE/Excerpta Medica – and later that year Onno van Schayck had been appointed as the first International Editorial Adviser. By 1999, a 16-page hard copy issue was being published quarterly, and the papers were also published online on the GPIAG website.

The year 1997 marked the tenth anniversary of the founding of the GPIAG and to celebrate this, the journal published a review by Ian Charlton which summarises the achievements of that first decade.

Over the next three years manuscript submissions increased, the journal’s reputation increased, more papers were published, and at the Society’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in 2000 it was decided to change the title to the Primary Care Respiratory Journal, to reflect the fact that published papers were focussing on many other respiratory conditions in primary care, not just asthma. At the same time, the Society’s name was changed to the General Practice Airways Group to reflect its increasingly diverse membership.