History
The NZMSJ was established by a group of Otago medical students completing studentships in Dunedin over the summer of 2002-2003. They identified the need for students to gain experience in publishing their findings of their own original research, including that which would not necessarily be considered by the established medical journals. This group formed a small editorial board, and, under the leadership of Ayesha Verrall, secured funding through a University of Otago grant for $20,000, which when supplemented by a modest advertising income, allowed them to produce the first issue of the journal in March 2004. A launch function was held in Dunedin and attended by the then Health Minister, Annette King, who agreed to fund a second issue, which was published a year later in March 2005. Access Annette King's NZMSJ launch speech here. A further issue followed in October as the journal made the landmark shift to biannual publication.
The core ethos of the journal, as solidified at a strategic planning meeting during the journal’s expansive phase in 2005, is threefold:
1. To support medical student professional development
2. To be a forum for opinions and discussion
3. To publish the educational writing of medical students
2006 was another watershed year for the journal as many of the initial executive members moved on to Otago’s satellite clinical schools in Wellington and Christchurch and for the first time an effort was made to recruit students from Auckland.
The journal underwent another phase of development in 2010. A formal constitution was written and the ‘NZ Medical Student Journal Society’ was registered with the Charities Commission. The journal also began to publish regular themed issues and invited commentary from guest editors. The first of these new themed issues, which coincided with the NZMSA’s annual conference in 2010, was the inaugural winner of the NZMSA’s Award for the Best New Student Initiative in 2010. The award was given in recognition of the excellent contributions the NZMSJ has made in furthering and promoting medical student research in New Zealand.
The journal structure and operation underwent significant change again in 2011. The ‘Executive Committee’ was restructured to separate the ‘Editorial’ and ‘Commercial’ functions. The former ‘Academic Editorial Board’ and ‘Features Editorial Board’ were merged to enable student reviewers (formerly ‘Editors’) to review a range of articles, not just academic or feature articles in isolation. Names of the leadership roles and positions within the new executive were changed so that they were consistent with the titles and roles used in publishing. With the creation of the Academic Editor and Feature Editor roles, Sub-Editor roles were created to support the section editors; namely in distributing the workload and provide training for potential succession. The role of Deputy Editor was also developed for the same reason
The then Editor, Benson Chen, also began negotiations with the New Zealand Medical Association to increase cooperation between the student journal and the ‘parent’ journal, the New Zealand Medical Journal. The journal’s finances were in fairly poor shape, as many of the regular advertisers had pulled out during the economic recession, and the journal itself had to change printers and undertake design work in-house to minimise costs. An agreement was struck with the NZMA through the advertising manager for the NZMJ and the Chief Executive of the NZMA, with the plan for NZMJ and NZMSJ’s advertising to be handled together. Additionally an informal agreement was established which allowed the NZMSJ to republish work published in the NZMJ.
In 2012, Mariam Parwaiz consolidated some of the work that Benson Chen had started. The main focus was to improve the finances of the Journal and financial support from NZMA (Volvo), the Universities of Otago and Auckland, and MAS helped ensure the Journal was able to cover all costs of production. Joyce Hipolito, a design student from the University of Auckland, was recruited to help with the design of the Journal. This is an area we have struggled with in recent times.
The NZMSJ faced a challenging year in 2013. We farewelled many senior members who had been part of NZMSJ for several years and there were not many new recruits, so the editorial board was stretched. We also received a reduced number of submissions in New Zealand. However, with the team’s hard work, issue 17 was published.
A similar problem was faced in 2014 but with a few additions. Firstly, the entirety of the Editorial Board (including the Editor-in-Chief) was replaced by newly promoted members, which created some difficulty in understanding individual roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, for much of the year we could not secure a reliable Design and Production Manager. We were lucky to have a colleague with experience in the appropriate software to put together a combined Issue, which also marked the 10-year publishing anniversary for the Journal. However, important progress was made that year. First, the Journal’s Editorial Board had in large part consisted of students from the University of Auckland. Given the opportunity to establish a new Board, we successfully recruited members to achieve a roughly 50/50 split between the two medical schools. Second, the Journal had had a tributary and basic webpage based off the Otago medical school parent website. Our talented web designer established a standalone website with our own domain name. Lastly, we had inherited a peculiar set of cheque-books, but decided it was time to open an online bank account instead.
Most of the team stayed on for 2015. Our goal in 2015 was to develop a slightly more robust revenue arrangement from the Universities of Auckland and Otago. We moved our publishing to Format Print and changed the type of paper we used, resulting in a 30% reduction in printing costs with no impact in quality of the final product. The Journal’s aesthetic and professionalism also greatly benefited from the work of Rebecca Frogley, our exceptionally talented Design Manager at the time.
The journal in 2017 continued to push the frontiers of modern publishing with the new introduction of Visual Abstracts to enhance research dissemination and promote communication. We published these all over our new interactive and dynamic social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), and in 2018, a “Social Media Manager” role was developed to maintain these accounts. Further, to keep our journal in-line with mainstream international journals, all submissions were funnelled through a new online academic journal management system, Scholastica. Scholastica allowed editors to streamline and handle several manuscripts at the same time. Finally, in addition to our comprehensive How to Submit your Manuscript guideline, we produced the How to Revise your Manuscript guideline, to assist authors with the common FAQ “how do you reply to a reviewer/editor”.
To the more significant long-term picture, we aimed to better and formalise the relationship with colleges to seep educational content or invited articles. We established three Education Contributors, which included the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. The Creative Writing Competition was created in conjunction with the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association, with the aim of showcasing the creative talents of medical students and collating their writing as taonga. Finally, our financial support exploded by 330%, and we developed an Advisory Board with previous chief editors. This board's aim was to assist the continuity of vision and future direction of the Editorial Board given the core editorial team change often.
The following year (2018) was a busy year. The NZMSJ team trialled re-introducing the issue launch event with the creation of a new role, the Academic Events Officer. This took place in Auckland and featured a panel of speakers, including Prof Phillippa Poole, discussing the choice of medical/surgical speciality, the theme of Issue 26. There was increased collaboration with the NZMSA to organise joint workshops at the Education Summit and Clinical Leadership Forum. This positive interaction has subsequently led to signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the NZMSA to ensure future collaborations between the NZMSJ and NZMSA. The NZMSA/NZMSJ Creative Writing Competition was modified to the Creative Arts Competition to allow for photographic and artwork entries. We also secured a monetary prize from Professor Frank Frizelle for student-authored academic submissions to the NZMSJ, which was later named the Verrall Award. On the publishing front, we introduced a professional proofreading and pdf draft checking step by the authors for each published article and produced the largest issue (issue 27) in the history of the NZMSJ so far at 96 pages!
The unexpected cost of printing such a large issue as well as additional costs required to make the Journal eligible for PubMed Central indexing caused the 2019 team to tighten their budget. Fortunately, the Production Manager at the time, Yicheng Wei, managed to find a printing company, Fisher Print, that was significantly cheaper without compromising quality. This reduced our printing costs, the biggest expense in our budget, by nearly 50%. Meanwhile, we also increased the distribution of our printed issues to smaller sites, such as Whangarei, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Hawkes Bay, Invercargill, Nelson, Blenheim. To achieve our indexing goals, a new role was created called the “Indexing Manager”. A decision was made to move the electronic copies of our issues onto Scholastica, to allow us to fulfil some of the indexing requirements more easily. Other achievements in 2019 included initiating a partnership with the medical school in Samoa to invite their students to submit their work to us and include them as part of our readership; creating two feature article series called the Stats Primer and Māori Health Review; and celebrating the 15th anniversary issue (issue 29) of the NZMSJ with the theme of “Towards equity in healthcare”.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 caused the NZMSJ team to place a large focus on our social media and online promotional strategies to be able to continue engaging with our readers, which resulted in improved engagement with our readers. The strategy included activating an Instagram account, holding online issue launch events, increasing our methods of electronically distributing our published issues, and creating the NZMSJ Blog. With increased expenses required to meet all the requirements for an indexing application, the Editor-in-Chief sought to increase the amount of sponsorship received, but only managed to gain an additional 50% of the initial target, which was partly due to the economic effects COVID-19 has had. The team debated two important ideas for the future of the Journal, which were whether the NZMSJ should change to a journal for all health professional students and not just medical students. The majority of the team voted against this idea. The other idea, which was agreed upon, was to move the majority of non-academic articles onto the Blog instead of our issues. The main reason for this was because to become indexed on PubMed, the Journal would need a greater ratio of academic to non-academic articles, which we were not achieving. Other achievements included initiating the Researcher Spotlight, where the Journal would showcase a nominated student for the work they had done in research and be awarded a prize as a token of their achievements; initiating the RANZCOG Award for the best blog post written by a medical student each year, with the monetary prize kindly donated by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG); and being invited to speak on a panel at a (virtual) international conference for the first time, hosted by the University of Monterrey’s Medical Students’ Association (Mexico).
The core ethos of the journal, as solidified at a strategic planning meeting during the journal’s expansive phase in 2005, is threefold:
1. To support medical student professional development
2. To be a forum for opinions and discussion
3. To publish the educational writing of medical students
2006 was another watershed year for the journal as many of the initial executive members moved on to Otago’s satellite clinical schools in Wellington and Christchurch and for the first time an effort was made to recruit students from Auckland.
The journal underwent another phase of development in 2010. A formal constitution was written and the ‘NZ Medical Student Journal Society’ was registered with the Charities Commission. The journal also began to publish regular themed issues and invited commentary from guest editors. The first of these new themed issues, which coincided with the NZMSA’s annual conference in 2010, was the inaugural winner of the NZMSA’s Award for the Best New Student Initiative in 2010. The award was given in recognition of the excellent contributions the NZMSJ has made in furthering and promoting medical student research in New Zealand.
The journal structure and operation underwent significant change again in 2011. The ‘Executive Committee’ was restructured to separate the ‘Editorial’ and ‘Commercial’ functions. The former ‘Academic Editorial Board’ and ‘Features Editorial Board’ were merged to enable student reviewers (formerly ‘Editors’) to review a range of articles, not just academic or feature articles in isolation. Names of the leadership roles and positions within the new executive were changed so that they were consistent with the titles and roles used in publishing. With the creation of the Academic Editor and Feature Editor roles, Sub-Editor roles were created to support the section editors; namely in distributing the workload and provide training for potential succession. The role of Deputy Editor was also developed for the same reason
The then Editor, Benson Chen, also began negotiations with the New Zealand Medical Association to increase cooperation between the student journal and the ‘parent’ journal, the New Zealand Medical Journal. The journal’s finances were in fairly poor shape, as many of the regular advertisers had pulled out during the economic recession, and the journal itself had to change printers and undertake design work in-house to minimise costs. An agreement was struck with the NZMA through the advertising manager for the NZMJ and the Chief Executive of the NZMA, with the plan for NZMJ and NZMSJ’s advertising to be handled together. Additionally an informal agreement was established which allowed the NZMSJ to republish work published in the NZMJ.
In 2012, Mariam Parwaiz consolidated some of the work that Benson Chen had started. The main focus was to improve the finances of the Journal and financial support from NZMA (Volvo), the Universities of Otago and Auckland, and MAS helped ensure the Journal was able to cover all costs of production. Joyce Hipolito, a design student from the University of Auckland, was recruited to help with the design of the Journal. This is an area we have struggled with in recent times.
The NZMSJ faced a challenging year in 2013. We farewelled many senior members who had been part of NZMSJ for several years and there were not many new recruits, so the editorial board was stretched. We also received a reduced number of submissions in New Zealand. However, with the team’s hard work, issue 17 was published.
A similar problem was faced in 2014 but with a few additions. Firstly, the entirety of the Editorial Board (including the Editor-in-Chief) was replaced by newly promoted members, which created some difficulty in understanding individual roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, for much of the year we could not secure a reliable Design and Production Manager. We were lucky to have a colleague with experience in the appropriate software to put together a combined Issue, which also marked the 10-year publishing anniversary for the Journal. However, important progress was made that year. First, the Journal’s Editorial Board had in large part consisted of students from the University of Auckland. Given the opportunity to establish a new Board, we successfully recruited members to achieve a roughly 50/50 split between the two medical schools. Second, the Journal had had a tributary and basic webpage based off the Otago medical school parent website. Our talented web designer established a standalone website with our own domain name. Lastly, we had inherited a peculiar set of cheque-books, but decided it was time to open an online bank account instead.
Most of the team stayed on for 2015. Our goal in 2015 was to develop a slightly more robust revenue arrangement from the Universities of Auckland and Otago. We moved our publishing to Format Print and changed the type of paper we used, resulting in a 30% reduction in printing costs with no impact in quality of the final product. The Journal’s aesthetic and professionalism also greatly benefited from the work of Rebecca Frogley, our exceptionally talented Design Manager at the time.
The journal in 2017 continued to push the frontiers of modern publishing with the new introduction of Visual Abstracts to enhance research dissemination and promote communication. We published these all over our new interactive and dynamic social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), and in 2018, a “Social Media Manager” role was developed to maintain these accounts. Further, to keep our journal in-line with mainstream international journals, all submissions were funnelled through a new online academic journal management system, Scholastica. Scholastica allowed editors to streamline and handle several manuscripts at the same time. Finally, in addition to our comprehensive How to Submit your Manuscript guideline, we produced the How to Revise your Manuscript guideline, to assist authors with the common FAQ “how do you reply to a reviewer/editor”.
To the more significant long-term picture, we aimed to better and formalise the relationship with colleges to seep educational content or invited articles. We established three Education Contributors, which included the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. The Creative Writing Competition was created in conjunction with the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association, with the aim of showcasing the creative talents of medical students and collating their writing as taonga. Finally, our financial support exploded by 330%, and we developed an Advisory Board with previous chief editors. This board's aim was to assist the continuity of vision and future direction of the Editorial Board given the core editorial team change often.
The following year (2018) was a busy year. The NZMSJ team trialled re-introducing the issue launch event with the creation of a new role, the Academic Events Officer. This took place in Auckland and featured a panel of speakers, including Prof Phillippa Poole, discussing the choice of medical/surgical speciality, the theme of Issue 26. There was increased collaboration with the NZMSA to organise joint workshops at the Education Summit and Clinical Leadership Forum. This positive interaction has subsequently led to signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the NZMSA to ensure future collaborations between the NZMSJ and NZMSA. The NZMSA/NZMSJ Creative Writing Competition was modified to the Creative Arts Competition to allow for photographic and artwork entries. We also secured a monetary prize from Professor Frank Frizelle for student-authored academic submissions to the NZMSJ, which was later named the Verrall Award. On the publishing front, we introduced a professional proofreading and pdf draft checking step by the authors for each published article and produced the largest issue (issue 27) in the history of the NZMSJ so far at 96 pages!
The unexpected cost of printing such a large issue as well as additional costs required to make the Journal eligible for PubMed Central indexing caused the 2019 team to tighten their budget. Fortunately, the Production Manager at the time, Yicheng Wei, managed to find a printing company, Fisher Print, that was significantly cheaper without compromising quality. This reduced our printing costs, the biggest expense in our budget, by nearly 50%. Meanwhile, we also increased the distribution of our printed issues to smaller sites, such as Whangarei, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Hawkes Bay, Invercargill, Nelson, Blenheim. To achieve our indexing goals, a new role was created called the “Indexing Manager”. A decision was made to move the electronic copies of our issues onto Scholastica, to allow us to fulfil some of the indexing requirements more easily. Other achievements in 2019 included initiating a partnership with the medical school in Samoa to invite their students to submit their work to us and include them as part of our readership; creating two feature article series called the Stats Primer and Māori Health Review; and celebrating the 15th anniversary issue (issue 29) of the NZMSJ with the theme of “Towards equity in healthcare”.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 caused the NZMSJ team to place a large focus on our social media and online promotional strategies to be able to continue engaging with our readers, which resulted in improved engagement with our readers. The strategy included activating an Instagram account, holding online issue launch events, increasing our methods of electronically distributing our published issues, and creating the NZMSJ Blog. With increased expenses required to meet all the requirements for an indexing application, the Editor-in-Chief sought to increase the amount of sponsorship received, but only managed to gain an additional 50% of the initial target, which was partly due to the economic effects COVID-19 has had. The team debated two important ideas for the future of the Journal, which were whether the NZMSJ should change to a journal for all health professional students and not just medical students. The majority of the team voted against this idea. The other idea, which was agreed upon, was to move the majority of non-academic articles onto the Blog instead of our issues. The main reason for this was because to become indexed on PubMed, the Journal would need a greater ratio of academic to non-academic articles, which we were not achieving. Other achievements included initiating the Researcher Spotlight, where the Journal would showcase a nominated student for the work they had done in research and be awarded a prize as a token of their achievements; initiating the RANZCOG Award for the best blog post written by a medical student each year, with the monetary prize kindly donated by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG); and being invited to speak on a panel at a (virtual) international conference for the first time, hosted by the University of Monterrey’s Medical Students’ Association (Mexico).
Past Issues
Year |
Issue |
Theme |
Editor-in-Chief |
2004, March |
1 |
- |
Ayesha Verrall |
2005, March |
2 |
- |
Ajay Sud |
2005, October |
3 |
- |
Rosemary Wyber |
2006, May |
4 |
- |
John Scotter |
2006, October |
5 |
- |
John Scotter |
2007, October |
6 |
- |
Brian Grainger |
2008, March |
7 |
- |
Brian Grainger |
2008, July |
8 |
Rural |
Brian Grainger |
2009, May |
9 |
- |
Sophie Parker |
2009, October |
10 |
- |
Sophie Parker |
2010, May |
11 |
Wellbeing |
Benson Chen |
2010, October |
12 |
Medical Student Selection |
Benson Chen |
2011, July |
13 |
Disaster Medicine/Global Health |
Benson Chen |
2011, November |
14 |
Election Year Special |
Benson Chen |
2012, July |
15 |
Professionalism |
Mariam Parwaiz |
2012, November |
16 |
Medical Humanities |
Mariam Parwaiz |
2013, May |
17 |
Voluntourism |
Amelia Shin |
2014, September |
18/19 |
10 Year Anniversary Issue |
Ammar Alsamarra'i |
2015, May |
20 |
Medical Student Consent |
Ahmed Abdile |
2015, September |
21 |
Bullying & Harassment |
Ahmed Abdile |
2016, July |
22 |
- |
Ahmed Abdile |
2016, November |
23 |
Resident strikes |
Ahmed Abdile |
2017, June |
24 |
Waikato Medical School |
Cheyaanthan Haran |
2017, November |
25 |
Academic Clinician |
Cheyaanthan Haran |
2018, May |
26 |
Choice of Medical Specialty |
Aleksandra Turp |
2018, December |
27 |
Future of Healthcare |
Aleksandra Turp |
2019, June |
28 |
A.I. in Healthcare |
Logan Williams |
2019, November |
29 |
Towards Equity in Healthcare |
Logan Williams |
