Some problems facing scientific medical publications in Nigeria

Although one of the earliest recorded medical publications was recorded in Europe about the middle of the 17(th) Century, the earliest medical publication in West Africa was in the 1920s - three centuries later. However, since then, a number of other biomedical journals have been published, a few of them regularly, and only a fraction of them have met the criteria for indexing in PubMed. This, therefore, has made a large number of medical articles published in Nigeria and West Africa unavailable to the outside world as the search engines would be unable to pick these publications. Despite the efforts of many researchers in Nigeria and other West African countries to publish in medical journals in the industrialized countries, most have not been able to meet the high standards of these journals due to paucity of resources, infrastructure and training. This, therefore, underpins the need for regular update courses on medical manuscript writing in the West African sub-region with a view to enable authors in the sub-region meet the standards set by indexed journals in various parts of the world; such courses will also help journal editors keep abreast with current demands in editing, review process and publication in order to meet the criteria for indexing.