Welcome to the inaugural issues of the Texas Family Medicine Research Journal (TFMRJ), a new periodical publishing home for the Family Medicine community in Texas.

The TFMRJ is a quarterly open-access, nonprofit, peer-reviewed, online journal, registered as a 501(c)3 charitable organization created to publish and disseminate current family medicine research, case reports, perspectives, and work in the humanities among the family medicine community of Texas. The journal serves to complement existing publications and provide a helpful avenue for authors from any research and publication background.

To accompany this first issue, we wanted to introduce the journal’s background and provide a preview of the content to come. Our first issue broadcasts award-winning research from the 2024 Texas Academy of Family Physicians Research Competition, just in time to gear up for the upcoming 2025 iteration of the competition. These abstracts and posters represent but a fraction of the diverse research happening in Texas, which we hope to continue to feature in our future quarterly issues.

Our why.

Primary care is vital to the American medical system and is perennially in short supply. To grow our specialty, we need a way to build the presence of family medicine in academic communities and foster our family medicine research base for our patients and physicians. One bottleneck to growing our future academic presence is the dearth of family medicine publishing opportunities. We do not need to frustrate our budding researchers with difficult, competitive submission criteria or requiring high submission fees. These factors deter new researchers and cause manuscripts and abstracts to waste away in archival hard drive storage.

Our new TFMRJ journal embraces the opposite philosophy, striving to become a welcoming space for medical students, residents, fellows, early career faculty, and community physicians as well as seasoned family medicine researchers to recognize their academic pursuits and provide a helping hand to see their efforts to share their research come to fruition and help move the science of our field forward.

For authors, our current manuscript submission cost is a mere $50 per article. Our editorial board and reviewer panel includes medical students, residents, and faculty from medical schools and residency programs across the state of Texas to foster and mentor our authors through the manuscript submission and review process

The journal’s beginnings.

Our meteoric publishing journey only recently began in 2024. A seasoned Austin family physician and a pre-med student, our own Dr. Larry Kravitz and Tim Heintz, conducted a needs assessment that revealed the lack of publishing opportunities for family medicine in Texas. With support and encouragement from the Texas Academy of Family Physicians (TAFP) and its Heart of Texas Chapter, our small initial editorial leadership team set an ambitious goal of releasing our first web-based issue in 2025.

We felt strongly that online publishing is the future for research through its efficiency, sustainability, and affordability. The online platform reduces publishing times and creates seamless communication between editors, reviewers, and staff. While some of our more traditional editors will miss the scent of a freshly printed issue, we felt it would be fitting to keep up with the times and rely on the wider reach of the online platform.

This issue’s content.

To achieve our rapid progression to the first issue’s publication, the articles of our first issue feature the winning posters from the November 2024 TAFP Research Summit competition. These works had already been submitted for editorial review and deemed worthy of attention from the wider family medicine community. To preserve these projects after the close of the research summit, we offered a permanent place in a searchable and viewable journal platform to reach a broader audience.

Future content.

The journal does not yet strive to have the highest impact; those publications already exist. Our content espouses a different but important value. By streamlining the publication process, we have the advantage of tapping more immediate trends and changes in family medicine. Also, by being accessible, we can draw perspectives from the wide expanse of family practice experiences across Texas. This work may come to us in the more achievable formats of case reports, editorials, poster competitions, quality improvement studies, journal club summaries, and even fiction and nonfiction narrative medicine. In this milieu, the journal is hopeful to be a wellspring of new academic pursuits.

So, this is our vision:

To expand the publishing space for expression of topics and research relevant to the field of family medicine in Texas, and target new submitters - medical students, residents, young/new faculty, and community physicians - by making publishing accessible and affordable, with the assistance that researchers need to stimulate their growth as consummate family medicine professionals.

To our readers, authors, and reviewers, we are here to support your research efforts. We exist to further the specialty of family medicine and the care of our patients. We aim to share and disseminate your work in family medicine throughout our state and beyond. Thank you for joining us on this journey and helping us grow.

The Texas Family Medicine Research Journal Editorial Board
August 2025