Abstract
Last year a bioethics colleague from another institution was expressing her frustration and doubts about the direction of the field of bioethics to me. Her concern was what she perceived as the growing trend towards empirical research in American bioethics as exemplified by the direction of my research and the research of Stanford’s bioethics center as well as our peers. While I (obviously) do not share the view that there is a problem with the increasingly empirical turn of our field, it did get me thinking about this journal and publishing in bioethics more generally. Like many of my peers, I often work as part of collaborative teams to carry out empirical research. And I think that is a healthy development for our field, and one of the reasons why our daughter journal, AJOB Empirical Bioethics, is such an important development for bioethics publishing. I also publish more conceptual or normative work, but often shorter pieces that can be published in scientific or medical journals. Journals like The American Journal of Bioethics do occasionally publish empirical pieces, but the vast majority of our Target Articles are substantial (5,000–7,000+ words) normative or conceptual scholarship. Most of the other top journals in the field have a similar focus. This means there is a small but growing disconnect between the types of scholarship being produced by U.S. leaders in bioethics and the top U.S. bioethics journals. This empirical turn is less pronounced in other parts of the world and we are seeing a growing number of submissions from other countries (a positive development).