Research and Publication
Abstract
Welcome to our inaugural issue of Journal of KIST Medical College (JKISTMC). JKISTMC is a multi-disciplinary, open-access, peer-reviewed, biannually published scientific journal. The journal is the official publication of KIST Medical College, Lalitpur Nepal. KIST Medical College was established with a promise of commitment to excellence in holistic health care, medical education and research. This first issue of the journal is an example of this noble objective of encouraging and promoting the scholar research activity and sharing them to wider range of readers.
In this inaugural Issue we have nine original articles, one case report, one review article, two book reviews and one view point. It is very encouraging for us to receive such diverse yet good quality papers, we would like to thank our contributing authors.
Though there are various reasons for research, we believe that it is done to update our existing practice of health care for overall benefit of the patients. Most of us will probably say that publication will serve only to achieve promotion in the race of faculty ladder from lecturer to professorship but having been involved in academic institutions where you have to deal with practice and principle of medical education, skill and attitude, you have to demonstrate academic talent to peers and your juniors to follow. So rather than compulsion, lets cultivate a culture of scientific research writing and publication and more importantly sustain it. JKISTMC is here to serve as one of the motivating factors as author-friendly, reader-friendly and rich in information medium to carry medical science forward.
When considering for research and publication, every researcher should follow the basic principle of intellectual honesty, however, one of the burning issues regarding publication at present time is the quality of the research papers and unethical practices associated with it. Sad but true, a huge pressure simply to increase the number of publication for promotion has become a major factor for such condition to arise. According to Lackovic, 10,000 scientific papers are published every day worldwide. (1) This is the result of “Publish or perish” syndrome which indicate quantitative rather than qualitative evaluation of scientific papers. Hence question might arise are we heading for corrupt scientific medical literature.2 Citation index is the parameter to gauge your publication. Impact factor (IF) of journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citation to recent articles published in the journal.3 If we look at the data, however, only 45% of the articles published in 4500 top scientific journals are cited within the first 5 years of publication.4 Only 42% of the papers receive more than one citation, 5-25% of these are self-citation by the authors or journals. Majority of publication goes uncited. This means that neither they are appreciated by the peers nor they are of any importance in improving patient care. 2
