Franz Joseph Ingelfinger (August 20, 1910 – March 27, 1980) was a German-American physician , researcher and journal editor. He served as Chief of Gastroenterology at Evans Memorial Department of Clinical Research, part of Boston University School of Medicine . He also served as Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) from 1967 to 1976. His work was influential in the field of science journalism .
7-520: The Ingelfinger rule is an eponymous rule named after Franz J. Ingelfinger , The New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM ) editor-in-chief who enunciated it in 1969. Editorials in most journals were published anonymously that time, so the paper was published without an author's name.. This rule - basically meant for scientific publishing , was originally meant only for NEJM . The rule was, that NEJM would not publish findings that had been published elsewhere, in other media or in other journals. The rule
14-517: A general practice as a physician. After initially wanting to enter the business world, faced with dwindling job opportunities after the Wall Street crash he decided to follow in his father and go into medicine. Ingelfinger earned diplomas from Phillips Andover Academy , followed by Yale University in 1932 and Harvard Medical School in 1936. The Ingelfinger rule is named after him. In 1969, one of Ingelfinger's first acts as editor of NEJM
21-902: The peer review process designed to check the work for errors and flaws. He used catchy titles for his editorials; for example in 1973, when Clean Air Act standards were lowered during the energy crisis : "Fighting carcinogens with underwear". He served as president of the American Gastroenterological Association . In 1979 he was presented the George Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians , given to leaders in academic medicine, research and teaching. He died in 1980, aged 69 from complications of esophageal cancer in Boston, Massachusetts . This biographical article related to
28-679: The Ingelfinger rule. In a defense of the policy, the journal said in an editorial that the practice discouraged scientists from talking to the media before their work was peer reviewed. Franz J. Ingelfinger Ingelfinger was born in 1910 in Dresden , Germany , the only child of Eleanor Holden and Joseph Franz Ingelfinger. He came to the United States with his family in the early 1920s to live in his mother's home town of Swampscott, Massachusetts where his German father established
35-411: The aim of preventing authors from performing duplicate publications which would unduly inflate their publication record. On the other hand, it has also been stated that the real reason for the Ingelfinger rule is to protect the journals' revenue stream, and with the increase in popularity of preprint servers such as arXiv , bioRxiv , and HAL many journals have loosened their requirements concerning
42-585: Was subsequently adopted by several other scientific journals, and has shaped scientific publishing ever since. Historically it has also helped to ensure that the journal's content is fresh and does not duplicate content previously reported elsewhere, and seeks to protect the scientific embargo system. An earlier version of the policy had been expressed in 1960 by Samuel Goudsmit , editor of the Physical Review Letters , but did not become as well known. The Ingelfinger rule has been seen as having
49-430: Was to draw up rules for authors forbidding prior submission or publication of their work in other media. This stipulation for authors and the related press embargo were designed to ensure that the articles published were original and "newsworthy." It also helped prevent what later NEJM editors called science by press conference , the practice of going directly to the media with scientific results rather than waiting for
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