Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences is accepted by PubMed Central® (PMC) and is indexed in Emerging Source Citation Index (ESCI)

The editorial board of Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences (JTUMS) is glad to inform the journal's readers, authors and reviewers that JTUMS is now archived in PubMed Central® (PMC), a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). PMC is an interlinked digital archive of full-text articles, freely accessible to all users worldwide. Additionally, this archiving endeavors to improve the visibility and citations of JTUMS publications, as PubMed is the first site for most physicians searching for medical information and evidence. JTUMS has been indexed by Scopus since long, and towards the end of last year, JTUMS was indexed by the Emerging Source Citation Index (ESCI), a new citation index in the Web of Science™ Core Collection that will certainly expand the citation universe of JTUMS. ESCI complements the highly selective indexes by providing earlier visibility for sources under evaluation as part of the Science Citation Index Expanded™ (SCIE), and others. Inclusion in ESCI provides greater discoverability, which leads to measurable citations and more transparency in the selection process.¹

We hope that the combination of archiving with PubMed Central and indexing by ESCI will reach wider scientific audience with more submissions of quality research articles. Contributions of innovative research and cutting-edge medical developments by eminent authors reciprocally increase the journal citations. This will facilitate our future intention of inclusion in the SCIE, which is usually after a two-year observation period for provision of an impact factor (IF).

We are immensely delighted to share the journal metrics that have substantially improved over the last few years:

• -The CiteScore (measures the three-year average citations received per document published in a journal): improved from 0.19 in 2014 to 0.78 in 2018.
• -The Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) (measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field): improved from 0.182 in 2014 to 0.621 in 2018.
• -The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) (a measure of the number of times an average paper in a particular journal is cited, and as such is conceptually similar to the Impact Factor): improved from 0.12 in 2014 to 0.239 in 2018.

This significant progress of the journal scientometrics led to proportionate increase in submissions to the journal, that was reflected on its acceptance rate. The acceptance rate of the journal was 24.3% in 2014 and became 12.5% in 2018.

The speed of review process of the journal has improved from 7.6/19.4 weeks in 2014 to 3.8/4.3 weeks for the first/final decision in 2018.

By and large, the journal covers a wide spectrum of medical and health sciences disciplines conducted on basic, clinical and translational research. The journal is wide-spread, and, in the last five years, our contributors represented 28 countries of the world. The journal contents have been viewed in the five continents, and we are proud to have exalted to this prestigious position for the journal.

We want to acknowledge the untiring efforts of the editorial board of JTUMS and support by Taibah University administration, our publisher Elsevier, reviewers, readers and those who trusted in us and contributed with their scientific work for publication. Without them, we would not have accomplished this landmark achievement. We promise all stakeholders that we would continue this journey towards achieving our goal of reaching appropriate international position.