Family Practice Launches Partnership with the Committee on Advancing the Science of Family Medicine (CASFM)

The Committee on Advancing the Science of Family Medicine (CASFM) and Family Practice are excited to announce a new partnership. This endeavour will publish peer reviewed CASFM Methods Briefs in each Family Practice issue and maintain a balance between briefs focused on quantitative and qualitative research methods.

CASFM members will be contributing methods briefs that are designed to be both a resource for full-time investigators and a means of educating Family Practice readers who did not receive formal training in research methods and statistics.

Read the statement from the Editor of Family Practice, Dr. Jeffrey Scherrer down below: 

In this issue we introduce a new section, the CASFM Methods Briefs. The North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG) established CASFM in 2006. The CASFM mission is to “promote and actively contribute to the academic discipline of primary care for the betterment of patients and their communities. It will also help to assure that the development, translation, and implementation of new knowledge rapidly becomes part of the fabric of family medicine.”. 

In the fall of 2017, I reached out to CASFM leadership (Gillian Bartlett, PhD) to solicit interest in establishing a partnership in which CASFM members would contribute recurring, peer reviewed, brief reports describing methods employed in primary care research. The CASFM reported great interest in contributing methods briefs that are designed to be both a resource for full-time investigators and a means of educating our readers who did not receive formal training in research methods and statistics. Ideas for CASFM Methods Briefs were obtained from our Editorial Board and range from the basics of pragmatic trials, to discourse and conversation analysis, to establishing evidence of causation in observational cohort designs.

Our goal is to cover both state of the art methods emerging in our field and review established practices such as varying methods used to build multivariate regression models. We endeavor to publish peer reviewed CASFM Methods Briefs in each Family Practice issue and maintain a balance between briefs focused on quantitative and qualitative research methods. Overtime, this partnership will generate a library of methods and subsequently become a primary resource for scientists conducting primary care research.

Prof. Jeffrey F. Scherrer
Editor, Family Practice

Read the full announcement here and gain access to the unlocked CASFM Methods Briefs here.