Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

Background: Regarding the increasing number of publications of researchers in medical sciences, an increased tendency toward scientific medical journals is seen in

Iran. Besides the growing number of these journals, it is of great importance to monitor and control their quality. Therefore, this study was designed to evaluate the qualitative and quantitative indexes of all 7 scientific medical journals affiliated to Iran University of Medical Sciences (IUMS) and to compare these indexes with the ones in Iranian exemplary medical journals during 2008-2010.    

Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study was performed on all 7 medical journals (including 5 Persian-language and 2 English-language journals) of IUMS (overall number of 40 issues) and 5 Iranian exemplary medical journals from Razi Research Festivals during 2008-2010 as the control group (overall number of 24 issues). Then, several qualitative and quantitative indexes were assessed and compared between these two groups of medical journals.    

Results: Analytical and descriptive cross-sectional studies were the most common type of study designs in most of the IUMS journals while this prevalence was significantly higher than control group (p<0.05). More than 60% of the published articles in Iranian exemplary medical journals were derived from approved projects or research grants whereas, this prevalence was less than 50% in all 7 journals of IUMS group. The mean duration between acceptance and publication time was approximately 3.5 months in control group, while it lasted as long as 10 and 10.5 months in Medical Journal of IUMS and Iranian Journal of Psychiatry and Psychology (IJPP), respectively (both p<0.001).   

Conclusion: The strong and weak points of each medical journal of IUMS were evaluated in this study. In order to improve the quality of IUMS scientific journals, it seems necessary to revise some visions and missions of these journals including giving priority to other-organization’s articles (rather than IUMS), research grant-derived manuscripts, clinical trials’ findings, decreasing duration of peer review and publishing processes. Also indexing in ISI and/or MEDLINE could attract higher qualified articles of national and international authors to be published in scientific journals of IUMS.