Public health disciplinary excellence

As a mature and productive discipline, public health needs three things. The first two requirements of public health excellence are familiar to us. First, we need access to the public health field so that we can, from experience, identify the problems that need to be resolved, and we need to maintain our access to the field so that we can g ather our data. Second, we need skills in appropriate research methods so that we can turn the data gathered in the field into scientif ic analysis. If we stop there, we can produce highly polished research addressing important issues in public health. A steady stream of articles submitted to the Journal show this polish. We want to argue that this is not enough. Highly polished research articles that focus on narrow discipli- nary concerns or that represent the interests of one institution are common. We know that they are a fact of life in a bureaucratic structure that sets one institution in competition with another doing ver y similar work. We also have a system that rewards detailed study of a limited range of phenomena. The problem is that we do not serve the discipline well if we publish articles, however pro- fessionally conducted, that address research questions that seem to have little relevance to public health in general but appear ver y important to one specific group or institution. If we follow this direction we run the risk of the Tower of Babel: public health researchers and practitioners who locate themselves in one or another highly constructed and ref ined tower can lose the capac- ity to communicate with those in other equally polished edifices. If we are to retain our capacity for communication despite the circumscribed conditions in which we work, we need the third requirement for a mature and productive discipline: a means of linking towers, recognising common threads that bind us to each other and to the discipline. We see the Journal as one such means of communication but it can only function in this way if the au-