The Granada Statements: An opportunity for the hospital pharmacist to make more impact in the publication world, part 2

In a recent editorial¹ we described the Granada statements² as a tool to strengthen pharmacy practice research as a discipline and focus on the appropriate use of terminology, and on the importance of producing impactful abstracts. Here in the second part, we focus on researchers’ selection of the most appropriate pharmacy practice journal to submit their work, to promote awareness of these journals among students, and of the importance of including pharmacy practice journal citations to strengthen the discipline, and to consider the role of the European Journal of Hospital Pharmacy (EJHP) for hospital pharmacy development.

The Granada statements declare that ‘Clinical and social pharmacy practice researchers should prioritise pharmacy practice and social pharmacy journals for some of their ‘best’ papers and work to ensure the of quality of the publication process considering the specific details of the area, even while seeking wider audiences as appropriate for various components of their work’. Therefore in order to improve the impact factors of pharmacy practice journals it is crucial that researchers, including supervisors and students, publish their high quality, interesting work and also include appropriate citations from pharmacy practice journals. The statements also declare that ‘Clinical and social pharmacy practice researchers, while maintaining autonomy, should be aware of the importance of the references they include in their published papers and consider the need to strengthen the discipline and its component journals in their manuscript bibliographies’.

In 2019 three EJHP editorials focused on the future research and development of hospital pharmacy.^3–5 We should move from our traditional role on product, preparation and quality, to a more patient oriented approach, focusing more on the quality of prescribing and development of clinical pharmacy. We also believe EJHP should consider any research focus or methods that produce results relevant to the wide range of practice around hospital pharmacy practice. This is what makes our journal unique. If a research manuscript is of good quality and focuses on these aspects it will be of interest to our readers and be published in our journal.⁶

Since being included in PubMed (from 2016) and MEDLINE from 2020 the submission rate has increased dramatically as has the EJHP impact factor, increasing from 0.47 to 2.53, and is nowadays in the top range of comparable journals. We suggest that hospital pharmacists both in and outside Europe consider EJHP as the main journal for publication of their research, and also cite our high quality publications when publishing in EJHP or other journals. This will improve the impact of hospital pharmacy and our journal.

We invite letters to the editor on these topics.

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