Annals of Neurosciences, Vol 16, No 1 (2009)
Annals of Neurosciences, Volume 16, Issue 1 (January), 2009
Letters to Editor
Dear Editor:
I have always wanted scientific journals in India to be internationally competitive: however, this can happen only when our “leading” scientists believe in publishing in Indian journals. This belief has often been missing and consequently, most of the papers published in journals published from India carry papers which either have been returned from the so-called “international journals” or were thought by the authors themselves to be not meeting the required “international standards»! Given this, the quality of most journals have remained poor. Poor quality of submissions is compounded by rather poor peer-review that most peers in the country are willing to provide. The undue love for “impact-factor” in science-establishments in our country is also impacting Indian journals because with poor submissions and poor peer-review, the quality of papers remains sub-standard and these obviously cannot attract good citations [1,2].
Given this rather disappointing experience, I would hope that under your leadership the Annals of Neuroscience would really strive to attract good manuscripts and have good peer-review system alongwith facilities for online submission and online reviewing. I also hope that this journal is quickly listed by indexing services like the Pubmed and ISI Web-of-knowledge, Scopus etc
I will try to contribute, whatever limited that I can, to help your efforts.
References
1 S. C Lakhotia Poor science, poor journals. Current Science 1990 59 (16), 773-774
2 S. C Lakhotia The vicious circle of poor science, poor journals and poor recognition Current Science 2003,85 (1) 20-22
S. C. Lakhotia, FNA, FASc, FNASc
Professor of Zoology & Dean, Faculty of Science
Cytogenetics Laboratory
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi 221 005
Dear Editor:
I congratulate you on taking over as the Editor and for your very forward looking plans. As I have been a journal editor or associate editor for 15 years and on several editorial boards, I would be happy to help your journal and the other members of the Advisory Board to draft new editorial guidelines, etc that can make it competitive. Let me provide you with a little input with regard to a print journal and a publisher which should be engaged in order to defer your publication costs and become competitive. From the publishing company point of view, if the publishers can sell the journal at about the cost and can make most of their money from advertising, they are looking at a threshold of about 2000 sold-copies to be able to make a profit. In my experience, if you can have the journal subscription to be part of the Academy membership dues, then you have a “captured readership” and the publishers will take on the print version with alacrity. I do not have experience of a pure eJournal but feel that most of the website programs like AOL, Google etc make their money out of the advertisements that they add. That is how they provide content free. You may have thought of this, but perhaps the pharmaceutical, instrument and biologic manufacturers may be willing to provide support based on the inclusion of their advertisements. Alternatively they might like to buy advert space, based on the number of hits. It is also a good idea to convene a meeting of the Editorial Advisory Board once a year.
Good luck with your endeavor.
Sincerely,
Walter G. Bradley, DM, FRCP
Professor and Chairman Emeritus
Department of Neurology
Miller School of Medicine
University of Miami
Dear Editor:
I am providing you with my insights about how the Annals of Neurosciences can be improved with the help of new team you are building. Annals could provide a means to encourage critical reading and writing skills in the graduate student and postdoc population in India, or elsewhere within its readership. I suggest that an entire issue each year be devoted to “Journal club” articles along the lines of those carried by the Journal of Neuroscience http://www.jneurosci.org/misc/ifa_features.shtml with the difference being that we could feature contributions written about ANY neuroscience paper written in the previous year. Students and postdocs could be motivated to participate in this -to identify a paper that interests them and write a Journal club about it- by awarding a prize to the best written such contribution. The issue should carry the best 20 or so articles, and perhaps one or more awards. The prize(s) should be substantial, such as $1000 toward travel to an International meeting such as IBRO or SFN. All contributions would be reviewed rigorously for the quality of their analysis of the original article. Making this an annual feature would serve to stimulate the student/postdoc community to develop critical reading and writing skills, and to participate in this as a community- we may see multiple entries from a single Institution or lab. Such writing may even become a part of graduate coursework, all of which would be very good for Neuroscience research in India.
Prof. ShubhaTole, Ph.D.
Department of Biological Sciences
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Mumbai, India
Dear Editor:
I have been associated with the journal as its editor for over last five years and found it an interesting and a challenging job. I am confident of your capabilities that you will keep the quality of the journal high so that it will touch new heights in the coming years under your dynamic leadership. I will however provide certain suggestions that will help. You may reconstitute the Editorial Board keeping an equilibrium of basic and clinical experts so that it may cover all areas of neurosciences and also keep regional balance. You may also keep a co editor, if that helps you, to share your work from time to time. You might want to redesign the cover if you feel so and raise funds from pharmaceutical firms as sponsors. With this I am also forwarding some of the manuscripts which may be included in the first issue of 2009. The subsequent issues are due in April. July and October. In addition to this, the abstract issue is published in December in coordination with Secretary of the Annual meeting.
Rakesh Shukla, DM
President, Indian Academy of Neurosciences
Professor, Department of Neurology
Chattrapati Shahuji Mahraj Medical University
Lucknow
How to make a medical journal more citable?
Dear Editor:
It is heartening to note that the new editorial board of Annals of Neurosciences (ANS) is trying to enhance its quality, readership and create a new model for communicating research results, commentaries and reviews. Open Access journals1 are likely to be cited more and therefore having a proper Open Access Policy for any journal is desirable.
Citation of a journal article is measured variously by Impact Factor, Weighted Impact Factor, PageRank, Eigenfactor, h-index, and other criteria2–6 Bollen etal.7, have done a comparative study of the scientific measures of impact of a paper. However, concerns still remain on how to judge a journal or an individual publication. Therefore, it should be prudent for the editors to carefully deal with certain contentious issues like Conflicts of Interest. The recent case between JAMA 8 and Jonathan Leo 9 has raised a considerable hue and cry among the academic researchers and the general public. Such conflicts of interest can be very important while interpreting any research publication.
Further, the editors can ensure that the papers published in the journal are clear, concise, complete and correct 10.
I sincerely hope that the editors will succeed in making ANS the fountainhead of new knowledge and expression in the field of neurosciences.
Suptendra Nath Sarbadhikari
Editor-in-Chief, Indian Journal of Medical Informatics
Department of Biomedical Informatics
PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research
Coimbatore 641 004
References
1 Sarbadhikari, S.N. (2007), The metamorphosis of the Indian Journal of Medical Informatics. Indian Journal of Medical Informatics, 2(1). 1
2 Garfield E. The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. JAMA2006;295(1):90-3.
3 Editors. The impactfactor game. PLoS Medicine 2006;3(6):707.
4 Dong P, Loh M, Mondry A. The “impact factor” revisited. Biomed Digit Libr2005;2:7.
5 Castelnuovo G. Ditching impact factors: Time for the single researcher impact factor. BMJ 2008;336(7648):789.
6 Suber P (January 20, 2009), PLoS ONE will offer more impact- related data on articles: http://www.earlham.edu/-peters/fos/2009/01/plos-one-will-offer-more-impact-related.html
7 Bollen J, et al., (2009) A principal component analysis of 39 scientific impact measures. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0902/0902.2183v1.pdf
8 Editors, 2009, Conflicts over Conflicts of Interest, http://jama.ama-assn.org/misc/jed90012pap_E1_E3.pdf
9 Leo J (2009): Academic freedom and controversy over the publication of factually correct, publicly available information, http://online.wsj.com/public/resource5/documents/leo_statement_for_WSJ.htm
10 Gastel B (April 12, 2009), Editorial Help: More Than Correcting Grammar, http://www.authoraid.info/news/editorial-help-more-than-correcting-grammar
Dear Editor:
I appreciate your view towards improvement of the scientific quality of of the journal. Since inception of the journal we are facing the problem of getting sufficient number of papers to get proper review and incorporate valuable suggestions. On this aspect, I will suggest you to approach individual members through email requesting them to send you interesting observations/ possible review on their research subject of study. This may act as a great facilitator for your efforts. Your request could also include soliciting valuable suggestions towards improvement of scientific content of the journal. Your continuous writing to established members will generate good response. I am confident you will get some good manuscripts for publication. Once you have enough papers automatically the quality will start moving up. You will get many more suggestions and then you can discuss among your editorial board and give it final shape.
Best wishes
A.K. Agrawal
Developmental Toxicology Division
Indian Institute of Toxicology Research
P.O. BOX-80, M.G. Marg
Lucknow-226001
Dear Editor:
I was wondering Neuroscience could introduce two features
1) Specifically adding a section on Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience
2) Increase student interaction by solicit reviews of interesting papers published in Neuroscience journals.
Nandini Singh
NBRC, Manesar
Dear Editor:
We need to increase the submissions from research labs and from clinical researchers. Looks like a lot of work for you to get the Indian neuro community on board.
Colin L Masters, MD
Executive Director and Laureate Professor
The Mental Health Research Institute
National Neuroscience Facility
University of Melbourne
ParkvilleVic 3010 AUSTRALIA
doi: 10.5214/ans.0972.7531.2009.160115
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