Journal of Cancer Education: A Comprehensive Overview

The Journal of Cancer Education (JCE) serves as a vital platform for disseminating knowledge, promoting innovation, and fostering collaboration within the global cancer community. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the journal, its scope, impact, and contributions to the field of cancer education.

Scope and Focus

The Journal of Cancer Education is dedicated to advancing cancer education across various domains, including patient care, survivorship, and research. The journal prioritizes patient-centered approaches and highlights the role of technology and innovation in improving cancer outcomes. JMIR Cancer (JC, ISSN: 2369-1999), with Naomi Cahill, PhD, RD, as Editor-in-Chief, and serving as Scientific Editor at JMIR Publications, Canada, shares this focus, emphasizing education, innovation, and technology in cancer care, cancer survivorship and cancer research, and participatory and patient-centred approaches.

JCE's scope encompasses a wide range of topics, including:

Patient Education: Strategies for informing and empowering patients about cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship.
Professional Development: Resources for training and educating healthcare professionals in oncology.
Public Health Initiatives: Programs aimed at raising cancer awareness and promoting healthy behaviors within communities.
Innovative Technologies: Exploration of new technologies and digital tools for enhancing cancer education and care delivery.
Cancer Survivorship: Addressing the unique needs and challenges faced by cancer survivors.
Cancer Research: Disseminating research findings related to cancer education and its impact on patient outcomes.

The journal welcomes submissions of original research, viewpoints, reviews, tutorials, and non-conventional articles. In the “Patients’ Corner,” the journal encourages patients and survivors to submit short essays and viewpoints on all aspects of cancer.

Impact and Recognition

The Journal of Cancer Education has established itself as a reputable and influential publication in the field. Its impact is reflected in its citation metrics and recognition within the academic community. With a CiteScore of 5.9 (2024), JMIR Cancer is a Q2 journal in the field of Oncology, according to Scopus data.

Two methodological approaches were used for a retrospective perspective of JCE quality: Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Citation Analysis (CA). The Journal Impact Factor comparison included only medical or health journals with an educational focus. Citation Analysis was conducted to identify attributes of most cited JCE articles and their cancer education focus. Despite concerns in the literature about the merits of both methods, results provided useful insights about JCE quality.

Key Areas of Focus and Recent Trends

Several key areas and emerging trends are shaping the landscape of cancer education, and the Journal of Cancer Education actively addresses these topics:

Patient-Centered Care and Shared Decision-Making

The journal emphasizes the importance of patient-centered care, which involves tailoring treatment decisions to individual patient needs and preferences. As patients with cancer increasingly seek guidance from online sources, the patient-clinician relationship is at risk of being displaced by fragmented, often unreliable information. One of the primary drivers of this trend is the insufficient time available for in-depth, relational consultation with health care providers (HCPs). The current clinical routine, constrained by documentation and administrative demands, fails to allow adequate time for supporting the informational, emotional, and relational needs of patients navigating complex decisions. This shortfall undermines HCPs’ ability to engage patients in shared decision-making and weakens the foundation of trust between patient and HCP. For some patients, this can result in selecting less-effective treatments or turning away from evidence-based care toward unproven online alternatives. While policy reforms to reduce administrative burdens and free up time for patient education and counseling are essential, they are slow to materialize, making immediate, actionable steps at the clinician level more urgent. Clinicians can adopt practical, evidence-informed strategies to help meet patients’ informational and emotional needs, strengthen patient-HCP relationships, and ensure that patients’ health care decisions fit their preferences and are supported by scientific evidence.

Technology and Innovation in Cancer Education

The integration of technology into cancer education is transforming how information is disseminated and how patients and healthcare professionals learn. Virtual patient navigation and online supportive care tools can extend the benefits of patient navigation to more patients, especially those with non-English language needs. Online self-management interventions for cancer survivors are increasingly being used, but engagement is often difficult for patients. Given the importance of engagement for intervention effectiveness, identifying patient-reported barriers and facilitators is essential.

Social media has emerged as a novel platform for delivering cancer-related educational content, garnering growing academic interest. However, a comprehensive assessment of the current research landscape in this domain is lacking.

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Addressing Health Disparities

The Journal of Cancer Education recognizes the importance of addressing health disparities in cancer care. Asian American patients have reported unique needs and barriers related to cancer care.

The Role of Narrative Competence

Despite growing evidence that expertise in narrative competence may benefit cancer care professionals and the field, few hematology-oncology trainees pursue graduate degrees in the humanities during fellowship. For those trainees with a particular interest in humanism in medicine, the integration of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree concurrent with fellowship training is advocated. This pathway enables trainees to gain advanced skills in narrative competence, informing research and scholarly activities during fellowship and building a foundation for future careers that promote humanism in the field of hematology-oncology across clinical practice, education, research, and advocacy.

Narrative competence refers to one’s ability to create space for and elevate the voices of patients, families, and clinicians through active listening, reflecting, sharing, finding meaning in, and being moved by stories. Frequent exposure to suffering increases burnout and threatens career longevity for cancer care clinicians, and narrative competence offers a humanistic approach to mitigate moral distress, improve wellbeing, and bolster resilience for the workforce. The influence of narrative competence extends beyond patient care, with meaningful ramifications for advancing research, education, and advocacy efforts across the field. Institutions with hematology-oncology fellowship programs that have capacity to support graduate studies should include the MFA as an option for trainees who aim to become thought leaders and experts in narrative competence. The MFA serves as a strategic mechanism to invest in growing the next generation of hematologists-oncologists with expertise in narrative competence to advance the field.

The Use of Real-World Data

Complementary therapies are being increasingly used by cancer survivors. As a channel for customers to share their feelings, outcomes, ideas, and perceived knowledge about the products purchased from e-commerce platforms, Amazon online reviews are a valuable real-world data source for understanding cancer survivorship care needs. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain inconsistently structured or free-text data, requiring efficient preprocessing to enable predictive healthcare models. While artificial intelligence-driven natural language processing tools show promise for automating diagnosis classification, their comparative performance and clinical reliability require systematic evaluation.

Surveillance Patterns for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Several guidelines recommend post-treatment surveillance for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, studies evaluating surveillance patterns often cannot distinguish between imaging ordered for surveillance versus symptoms suggestive of recurrence. Moreover, early recurrences and other competing events hamper efforts to determine true surveillance rates with wide variability in reports of guideline adherence in clinical practice. Leveraging comprehensive Veterans Health Administration data, a novel competing risks framework can be developed to describe patterns and predictors of NSCLC imaging surveillance.

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Support for Carers of People with Comorbid Dementia and Cancer

A growing number of people are living with comorbid dementia and cancer (CDC), and they are particularly likely to require support from family caregivers. Carers of people with CDC play a vital supportive role but have reported unmet support needs, including a lack of CDC-specific information resources and peer support. A targeted online peer support forum may provide an accessible way to help address unmet needs of carers of people with CDC.

Germline Genetic Variants and Prostate Cancer

Germline genetic variants are important for prostate cancer (PCa) management and hereditary cancer risk assessment, but testing is underused. Furthermore, patients are often unaware of the genetic connections to PCa. Social media is increasingly serving as a source of awareness for health information and a method to gather data from a large population.

Publication History and Metrics

The JCE publication history exceeds 600 peer reviewed cancer education articles.

The set of journals have been ranked according to their SJR and divided into four equal groups, four quartiles. The SJR is a size-independent prestige indicator that ranks journals by their 'average prestige per article'. It is based on the idea that 'all citations are not created equal'.

Evolution of Published Documents: This indicator counts the number of citations received by documents from a journal and divides them by the total number of documents published in that journal. The chart shows the evolution of the average number of times documents published in a journal in the past two, three and four years have been cited in the current year.
Citations per Document: Evolution of the number of total citation per document and external citation per document (i.e. International Collaboration accounts for the articles that have been produced by researchers from several countries. Not every article in a journal is considered primary research and therefore "citable", this chart shows the ratio of a journal's articles including substantial research (research articles, conference papers and reviews) in three year windows vs. Ratio of a journal's items, grouped in three years windows, that have been cited at least once vs.

*Evolution of the number of documents related to Sustainable Development Goals defined by United Nations. It estimates the article processing charges (APCs) a journal might charge, based on its visibility, prestige, and impact as measured by the SJR. YearEst. It represents the potential financial worth of a journal. It is obtained by multiplying the journal's Estimated APC by the total number of citable documents published over the past five years. YearEst.

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