Publication in high impact journals

We thank Singh et al. for their interest in our article and agree with many of their observations.[1] Regarding their suggestion of including sub-speciality journals, we would submit that while writing the said article,[2] we aimed to find Indian contributions in high impact ‘core’ anaesthesia journals only. We had initially thought of including subspeciality journals also but then decided against it for the following reason-

Anaesthesiology is a rapidly growing speciality with ever developing subspecialities like cardiac-anaesthesia, neuro-anaesthesia, paediatric-anaesthesia, onco-anaesthesia, obstetric anaesthesia, intensive care, pain medicine etc., with most of them having (one or even more) specific high impact journals. For example, while the authors mention ‘Journal of Neurosurgical Anesthesiology’ as one of the journals that could have been included, there is another journal named ‘Neurocritical care’ that is also a high impact neurocritical care journal. The same is true for other subspecialities as well. We felt that selectively including some sub-specialities (and some journals of a particular sub-speciality) while excluding others would have been unreasonable.

Yes, omitting these subspeciality journals does make us miss out on the contribution by Indian anaesthesiologists to an extent. We had planned the survey only as a starting point to get an idea about the present status of research in this country and the results of our study should be seen in that light only.

We agree that more extensive investigations willshed better light on this topic.

Financial support and sponsorship

Nil.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest.