Demography of Medical Journals in Iran; a Cross-Sectional Study

Policymaking in order to increase the quality of medical journals needs having accurate data from their current status.

The present study was designed with the aim of introducing a demographic scheme of Iranian journals in the field of medical sciences.

This cross-sectional study was performed on all the medical journals being published in Iran in 2016. The list of all journal titles was extracted by referring to the medical journals databanks (ministry of health, Magiran, IranMedex, Irandoc and…), and the data required for the study were gathered using journals' homepages or by phone or in person, by attending the journal's office.

Totally, 521 journals were assessed. Publication language used was English in 297 (57%) journals and 515 (98.85%) were open access. 381 (73.1%) journals were published quarterly and the year of starting publication was 2010 onwards in case of 245 (48.0%) of journals. There were 29 (5.56%) journals, which were indexed in all 3 databases of ISI, PubMed and Scopus. Only 4.81% of the journals had an official impact factor announced by Thomson-Reuters or Clarivate Analytics Company. Mean time needed for review of articles was 1.89 ± 1.52 (0.5 - 12) months (n = 146) and mean time interval between accepting an article and its print or electronic publication was 3.63 ± 2.17 (0 - 12) months (n = 144). Rate of membership of these journals in COPE and ICMJE were 40% and 27%, respectively.

Most medical journals being published in Iran were English quarterly journals that were regularly published in the fields of general medicine, open access, with university affiliations, centered in the capital, and more than 80% of them had started publishing from 2000 and afterwards.