ON THE JOURNAL
A reading list, written down.
Conversations In Orthopaedics is a weekly journal of literature analysis.
Editorial Mission
The case for the long form.
The journal exists for one purpose: to read contemporary orthopaedic literature carefully, in writing, every week. The modern surgical reader is offered an abundance of headlines and a scarcity of conclusions. Each issue of Conversations In Orthopaedics restores the older arrangement — one paper, fully examined, composed as an essay rather than a bullet list, with the argument finished before it is published.
Our medium is the written page. We have chosen this medium not for nostalgia but for fidelity: prose is the only form in which an argument can carry its own caveats, in which an effect size can be accompanied by the question of whether the effect matters, and in which a reader can return six months later and recover the reasoning intact. Slow medium, sustained engagement, finished writing — these are not aesthetic preferences but methodological commitments.
The journal is independent of institutional and commercial influence. It accepts no advertising and is supported by its readers. Authorship is named on every issue; correspondence is welcomed and, where it advances the argument, published. The archive remains open and indexed. The standard, week after week, is the same: the analysis we would want to read ourselves.
Editorial Board · The Masthead
The Masthead
Editors and invited specialists who read with the journal each week.
№ 01
Kamil R. Jarjess
Editor-in-Chief
Orthopaedic Research, Conversations In Orthopaedics
Editorial Method
How an issue is made.
The journal proceeds in five stages, in the same order, every week.
I
Selection
Each week opens with reading, not writing. The editor scans the most recent issues of the major peer-reviewed orthopaedic journals and the upstream periodicals that increasingly publish surgical evidence — looking for the one paper whose findings, methods, or framing most repay sustained attention. Selection is its own discipline. We favour studies that change practice, sharpen a controversy, or illuminate a method; we resist the gravitational pull of the press release.
II
Reading
The chosen paper is then read closely, repeatedly, and against its sources. Tables are reproduced by hand on paper. Effect sizes are recomputed where possible. Citations are followed back to their origin, and the prior literature is brought into the same room. The aim is not to summarise but to understand, with the slowness that understanding requires.
III
Conversation
Where the literature warrants it, an invited specialist joins the analysis. Conversations are conducted in writing or transcribed from extended interviews, never staged for performance. The point of a conversation is not the personalities involved but the disagreement between them — the places where two careful readers of the same paper would draw different conclusions, and why.
IV
Composition
Only then does composition begin. Each issue is written as a finished piece of prose with a thesis, an argument, and a conclusion. We treat clinical judgment as a matter of language and structure rather than bullet points. Drafts are revised against the source paper a final time, against the conversation, and against the previous week's issue. Nothing leaves the desk in note form.
V
Publication
Publication is the smallest part of the week. Each issue arrives with a citation, a DOI, a permanent home in the archive, and an open invitation to peer correspondence. We do not chase virality. The audience we are writing for is the reader who will return to the piece six months from now, on a different ward, with a different patient, and find the argument still standing.
CORRESPONDENCE
Letters and submissions are welcomed.
The journal publishes peer letters in response to issues, as well as invited submissions from surgeons and researchers whose work intersects with the literature under examination. Correspondence is read by the editor and, where the argument warrants public airing, printed in a subsequent issue under the writer's name.
Address: editor · conversationsinorthopaedics.com. Submissions of long-form analyses are reviewed on a rolling basis; please include a brief note of intent and the paper you propose to read.
Submit a piece
Write with the journal.
We publish a small number of invited and unsolicited long-form analyses each volume. The form is the same as our own: one paper, fully read, written as a finished essay.
Submit a piece