How to Improve the Visibility of Research in the Countries from the ‘Scientific Periphery’: A ‘Case Study’ [P02-220]

Abstract

Case history and symptoms:

Small number of prestigious scientific journals publishes most of the world's scientific information. Although scientists in developing countries represent 25% of the world's scientific community national journals from this 'scientific periphery' are poorly visible: the Science Citation Index (SCI) included less than 2% of these journals in 1995.

Clinical presentation:

A vicious cycle of inadequacy for these journals: small number and poor quality of manuscripts submitted, inadequate review process, and imperfect English prevents them from reaching higher visibility and eventually escaping form anonymity. Key problems seem to be poorly designed and unoriginal research, lack of knowledge of research methods and data presentation.

Treatment:

1. 1. Teaching principles of scientific research in medical schools.

2. 2. Author-friendly editorial policy - a procedure where most of the articles received are pre-reviewed intramurally and improved by providing guidance to the authors, before being sent out for extramural review.

3. 3. Proactive board of editors - who seek interesting research and encourage researchers to communicate their results.

4. 3. Networking regional collaboration.

Treatment outcome:

In the case of Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) that followed and partly developed the 'treatment' described, such policy resulted in significant formal success - inclusion of CMJ in the most selective international indexing databases (MEDLINE, Current Contents and Web of Science), open access status, decent visibility and attention of researches (impact factor 1.2). The original, active and efficacious approach of the editors of CMJ will be analyzed in this presentation.