Life of small medical journal--how bibliographical indexing and international visibility affected editorial work in Croatian Medical Journal.

Abstract

The Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) is in its 15th year of life – a time to stop and see how we are doing and what the future may be bringing. The CMJ has been started in 1992 to provide a window into medical research in small and developing communities, but also to serve as the doors for small scientific communities into the mainstream science (1). To fulfill these goals, we primarily focused our editorial efforts on education of our authors, both present and future, about scientific research and publishing, especially the presentation of research results (2-4). The most important step in bringing research from small and developing medical scientific communities to the mainstream science was the inclusion of the journal in international bibliographic databases (5) and making the journal available in free full text on the Internet (1,5,6). Especially relevant for the editorial work in the journal was the inclusion in two major bibliographic databases: PubMed/Medline in 1998, and databases of the then Institute for Scientific Information, now Thomson Scientific, in 1999. These years clearly demarcate two different editorial periods in the CMJ (Figure 1): period of slow development and period of intense growth and editorial activity in the journal. Figure 1 Total number of manuscripts submitted to the Croatian Medical Journal from 1992 to 2005. Arrows indicate indexing of the journal in the PubMed/Medline (1998) and Thomson Scientific databases (1999).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.