Hello to all members of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) from your new Journal editor. For me it is a great privilege to have been given the opportunity to pilot the affairs of the Nigerian Medical Journal (NMJ). Founded in 1964, the Journal continues to strive to live up to expectations.
The current editorial team salutes our predecessors who had worked hard in the continuous production and improvement of the Nigerian Medical Journal. These were the people who volunteered to share their valuable time and expertise by serving on the editorial board, as editors, and as reviewers. They provided guidance about content, solicit manuscripts, and ensured manuscripts were accurate. Expectedly, most of their spare time was spent reviewing manuscripts.
Expectedly, every change in editorship offers an opportunity for stock-taking and evaluation by asking, where are we going? Where have we been? What values are we providing to our readers? How can we do better?
To me, what makes a journal great includes its robust scientific contents, wide audience coverage and patronage. My first interaction with this NMJ was many years ago, during my residency program, when the Journal provided a very useful resource for learning and training. I am left with no doubt that this Journal will be great because of its vast potentials and the niche it aptly occupies as it strives to evolve 47 years after its establishment!
I discover that for a journal to be truly great it has to always be true to its soul and services. The task before us is enormous. It is one of becoming a Journal that offers ideas with impact. It is expected that our readers will eagerly wait to receive every issue of the Journal and refer to it often. It is desirable that the Journal becomes an outlet of rigorously conducted, relevant, scholarly activities of those academics who consider research as their other passion after teaching. Obviously, the pursuit for this excellence demands commitment and dedication.
One problem facing the Journal at the moment has to do with low visibility and problems with indexation in international indexing bodies particularly Index Medicus and Medline/-Pubmed besides many other indexations. Lack of high-quality research articles and shortage of quality manuscripts naturally creates a visibility-quality article complex (VQC)1–3. Raising the visibility and reaching international audience are issues of concern that we have to deal with. Increased global visibility helps to build the scientific reputation of the journal, which in turn enhances the content it publishes. Visibility for a journal is enhanced through indexation, which in turn requires quality article contents. It is the responsibility of medical journal editors to improve the visibility of their publications by improving their quality: attracting the best papers, inviting interesting and relevant commentaries, soliciting review articles and practice updates that are genuinely useful to readers, and so on.
As I contemplated on this new task, I thought about good journals, and the role they should play in the society. With this reflection, I asked myself what makes a journal great, and I decided that it is the people. We all have a role to play to make the Journal great, both in the content and the quality of production and print; ensuring that the Journal is on time and complete. We must help ourselves by working to improve the standards and publishing what is peculiar to our countries.
Writers are the nerves of any journal. In order to achieve our goals, we surely will encourage submission of the best manuscripts and inviting practitioners to share their valuable experiences. We solicit authors to send their well written articles to the Journal. This way, we will both break the VQC4 and help to disseminate knowledge and enhance scientific communication in our setting. With the current exclusive online manuscript submission and management ploicy, it means that the period of editing processes will be greatly shortened with enhanced peer-review, and publishing of qualified articles will greatly be fast tracked, in Nigerian Medical Journal. The open access policy of the Journal dictates that articles published in Nigeria Medical Journal will readily be accessed by the scientific community worldwide. It is hoped that authors will take advantage of this window of opportunity to patronize the Journal when considering where to publish their articles.
With the combined efforts of all of us, this Journal will become great. Thank you for your contribution in making the Nigerian Medical Journal the best a biomedical journal can possibly be.
REFERENCES
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