Combining American Journal of Health Promotion and The Art of Health Promotion into one Publication 

Effective with this issue, we are combining the American Journal of Health Promotion and The Art of Health Promotion newsletter into one publication, called the American Journal of Health Promotion. Subscribers to the newsletter or journal will now receive the combined, expanded publication. 

In 1997, we removed the practice-focused material from the Journal and created the newsletter. We did this in response to comments from Index Medicus that too much of our content was "practice-" versus "research-" focused, and that none of our articles would be indexed in their database as long as that remained to be true. At the time, we were also striving to raise the level of rigor of health promotion research, and believed that publishing a journal devoted to research would support this goal. 

We are now reversing that decision and restoring the practice-focused material to the Journal for a number of reasons. At a pragmatic level, the articles we publish can now be found through Index Medicus searches conducted on Medline, as well as through over a dozen other indexing services. More importantly, we feel compelled to return to our original editorial goal of narrowing the gap between the art and the science of health promotion. Our field continues to suffer from too many situations in which research is conducted by scientists without knowledge of the real priorities and constraints of practice and others in which programs are developed by practitioners without knowledge of existing research on program effectiveness. This lack of knowledge wastes research dollars and results in less effective programs. We hope that combining the publications will help solve this problem. Our hope is that practitioners who were receiving the newsletter will now be exposed to research issues, and researchers who were subscribing to the journal will now be exposed to practice issues. 

Over time, we will expand the "Art" section to include interviews, perspectives from different sectors of the field, and other features our readers recommend. We look forward to your ideas about what would be most valuable to you.

Stages of Change Reviews 

This issue of the science section of the Journal contains only three articles because one article by Dr. Leslie Spencer et al. is very long. This article is the first of a series of systematic reviews on the stages of change literature conducted by a team of authors. The overall review effort was conceived and coordinated by Dr. Troy Adams.

Transforming the Vision into Reality: Time to Register 

We have made excellent progress in recruiting superb speakers for our February 17-21, 2003, Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference which will be held in Washington, D.C. If you come, you will have the opportunity to spend half a day on Capitol Hill meeting with your Senators and Representative. For details, see http://www.HealthPromotionConference.org.

Health Promotion Advocacy 

The legislative year for the 107th U.S. Congress is winding down. The target adjournment date for both chambers is October 5, 2002. Our advocacy efforts are now focused on a number of priorities including negotiating to retain important report language we submitted to be included in the HHS appropriations bill, passing our resolutions in the Senate (Sen Con Res 11) and House (H Res 115) before the October adjournment, attempting to have our Health Promotion Research Act included in the President's Budget Request to the 108th Congress, working with federal agencies to develop details for our proposed Health Promotion Research Act, and supporting the recently introduced Improved Nutrition and Physical Activity (IMPACT) Act. IMPACT was introduced in the Senate (S2821) by Senators Frist, Bingamen, and Dodd, and will soon be introduced in the House of Representatives by Representatives Bono, Granger, and Lowey. To support these efforts, we encourage you to do two things: 1) Contact your Senators and Representative to ask them to co-sponsor the resolutions and the IMPACT bill, and 2) Join our grass roots advocacy network to be involved in these efforts on a regular basis. See our website (http://www.HealthPromotionAdvocates.org) for more detailed instructions and other updates.

Michael P. O'Donnell, PhD, MBA, MPH
Editor in Chief, American Journal of Health Promotion