To publish or perish

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Hematopathology brings newarticles, case reports and reviews. The aim of the journal isto bring relevant information to the readers and that remainsan important aim for the authors too. But for many academicauthors, writing is not only to bring ideas or data to others,but to have articles on their account to show to managementthat they perform well. There is a lot of attention forH-index, impact factors and other markers for quality. Itseems to me that the focus on impact factor is too strong.We learn from articles, use books and go to meetings tokeep up with developments in the areas we are most inter-ested in. In the yearly workshop on clonality testing, we seethat articles and lectures are certainly not enough to bringthe information needed to do good clonality testing intopractice. Because all participants bring their own cases andbecause they come from many different countries but allwith expertise, one gets a good idea how Hematopathologyis performed throughout the world. It is nice to see that mostare well aware of what goes on the literature, but also thatmost top papers deal with not clinically relevant research.This is not a real problem as long as there is sufficient roomfor articles that matter for clinical Hematopathology androutine practice. Such articles are plenty, but in journals thatare not regarded “top” like Modern Pathology, the AmericanJournal of Surgical Pathology, Histopathology and VirchowsArchives, and of course the Journal of Hematopathology.These are not the articles that are cited the most, but are readand used the most. But downloading of articles is monitoredbut taken in to account in quality measures. So the system isbasedonthefactthatbeingcitedismoreimportantthanbeingread.The Journal of Hematopathology can be reached throughsubscription and Google Scholar, but not through PubMed.The reason is that the number of case reports is regarded toohigh and those are not seen as important. And I believe theyare. This is a dilemma: not in PubMed, means not a lot ofcitations, and thus not attractive enough for authors topublish in. I hope that this situation will change, since thecomments I get from readers is very positive. And in theend, it is the reader we really write for (I hope).Han van Krieken