Change or Perish

 

 

Reza Malekzadeh MD*, Farrokh Habibzadeh MD^•**

*Digestive Disease Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, **Shiraz NIOC Medical Education and Research Center, Shiraz, Iran.

 

 

 

 

cademic institutions using the mantra of “publish or perish” make it imperative for faculty members to publish in order to survive.  No doubt, this phrase would be “change or perish” for a journal which has to survive under various pushes and pulls in the constantly changing world of scientific publishing.  Biomedical journals have changed during the past decade according to change in the needs of their readers, the availability of communications services, and the exploding trend in science production.  Such changes are evident in many leading clinical journals.

Over the past years, Archives of Iranian Medicine (AIM) has had several accomplishments.  It was accepted to be covered by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), Index Medicus/MEDLINE¹ in 2006, and by Thomson Scientific (formerly Thomson ISI) Science Citation Index (SCI) in 2007.  Gaining acceptance by these two prestigious indexing systems has put AIM among the few biomedical journals in the region which are indexed by both of these databases and secures an enormously increased visibility.  Expectedly, our submission rate as well as our readership, have been increased and thereby, we had to prepare for entering a new era to present on bigger stages—noblesse oblige.

Now, we are covered by these two indexing systems, but it does not mean that we will always be in.  There are tens of thousands of biomedical journals which compete for entering these indexing systems.  If we cannot improve our standards by changing appropriately, like dinosaurs which could not survive their environmental changes, we have no choice but to perish.

So far, we have made several changes to our Journal; since the beginning of 2008, we have increased the number of issues per year from four to six.  That would certainly help us publish more articles and inform our readers of up-to-date materials with more frequency. We are going to change our website to publish the accepted articles online before they appear in paper version of the Journal. Nonetheless, the increase in the submission rate has resulted in more cases of submissions of studies with scientific misconduct, plagiarism, and fraud that made us think of more serious ways to detect and tackle such unethical issues. We have accordingly changed our manuscript processing system with more emphasis on detection of such misconducts.

From this issue on, we incorporated a new section named “Opinion” in the Journal.  This section will be a forum for presenting a lively discussion on various controversial issues of science, at large, and medicine, in particular. The discussion is usually started with a short piece by the Section Editor or another one that will hopefully be followed by your comments.  Certainly, all of the statements published in this section are solely the opinion of respective authors and are not necessarily believed nor accepted by the Journal’s Editorial Board or Academy of Medical Sciences of the I.R. Iran.

In this issue, we start a discussion on the controversy of using the journal impact factor for evaluation of scientific merit of an article, researcher, or research center. We hope you will help us by sending your “opinions” too. The “Information for Authors” section of AIM was also changed. There, we briefly mentioned how to arrange and submit your opinions.

We are living in an ever-changing world, and to adapt to these changes, we have to make the necessary changes to our form of presentation, the format of our Journal, our website, etc. And, no one but you can help us to improve our job through your feedbacks. We hope by making these changes, we could survive the game of publication and make our Journal a better one to read.

 

Reference

1       Vessal K. Inclusion of the Archives of Iranian Medicine in Index Medicus/MEDLINE. Arch Iran Med. 2006; 9: 304.