Views of Iranian medical journal editors on medical research publication

Medical journal editors play an important role in optimizing research publication. This study evaluates the views of Iranian medical journal editors, and their knowledge of medical publication standards.

In May 2001, 51 editors from all journals approved by the Ministry of Health were invited to participate, 27 of whom completed the study. A self-administered questionnaire, based on the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URMS) was used which consisted of 28 questions in 9 subject fields. These fields included: peer review, conflicts of interest, authorship criteria, publication ethics, duplicate publication, mass media, advertising, competing manuscripts, and the Internet. The knowledge of the editors was assessed by a scoring system, with a range of -46 to +44 points.

Twenty-three of the participants were editors-in-chief and 4 were managing editors. Their average age was 47.3 +/- 8.7 years and 25 were male. All journals were peer-reviewed, most having 2 or 3 reviewers for each manuscript. Of the journals, 92.6% accepted or rejected an article on the basis of the views of most reviewers and 52%, sometimes or always, used a statistician as a reviewer. Most of the editors believed that writing the first draft and designing the study are authorship criteria, and most of them believed that these 2 are stated in URMS. Seven journals (25.9%) never published advertisements. Among journals that sold advertisements, the most popular policy (85%) was the rejection of advertisements because they advertised harmful products. Out of 27 journals, 12 were accessible on the Internet, and 7 had independent websites. Of the editors, 81.5% thought that a website is useful for their journal. The average knowledge score of the editors was 6.5 +/- 7.5. None had a negative score, 33% scored zero, 45% obtained average scores and 22% obtained good scores.

The results show that peer review is favored by all the editors studied, though it seems that journals do not follow clear-cut policies in this regard. Most of the editors, agreed with the statements of URMS to some extent and generally most have average to high knowledge of URMS.