Double life of medical journals: Dr Paper and Mr Web.

Abstract

Scientific journals of today are indeed split between two forms of existence: paper and electronic. Although many are foreseeing the end of the paper journals (1,2), we believe that the future of scientific journals will see the evolution of paper and electronic form as two complementary systems of communication in science and medicine. Freely available digital information and the speed of searching the global repositories of scientific knowledge are great assets and now an indispensable part of research and medical practice (3). Electronic dissemination of information and scientific results is particularly important for small and developing scientific communities, such as the one in Croatia (4). We were aware of this very early in the life of the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) and have tried to ride the tide of electronic revolution. Now is the time to master a few new elements of electronic publishing. So far, we have had to master tagging of the bibliographical information in the language that allows full search on the PubMed. After we accepted the mandate to send data in such a format to the PubMed and systematically implemented XML to our journal, with the support the grant from the Croatian Ministry of Science. We also shared our experience with editors and researchers in Croatia, as the part of our educational activities (5). We also successfully linked all PubMed entries to the full text of the articles published in the CMJ, meaning that now the reader can obtain a full-text article from the CMJ just by clicking on the icon to the left of the PubMed reference. Most recently, we have subscribed to the Google Analytical Service to monitor activities on our website for free. The data collected for the last two months (Table 1) show that most of our web-visitors access the Journal’s website directly by typing in the home-page address. Many access it also through Google, Yahoo, FreeMedicalJournals.com (website dedicated to the promotion of free access to medical journals over the Internet), and EBSCO (library service providing link and coverage information to more than 99 000 titles). The statistics for the last two month shows that about 45% of visitors are the returning visitors and come from all over the world, but mostly from Europe. Table 1 Search engines bringing visitors to the website of the Croatian Medical Journal (www.cmj.hr)* in December 2005 and January 2006 (report from Google Analytics Service) For a small journal and small scientific community, we have achieved good international visibility, but we still have some electronic leaps to make toward better service to our readers and authors.

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

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

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