What Will It Take? The Quest to Achieve Indexing by the National Library of Medicine

Abstract

To become indexed in MEDLINE has been a goal of the Canadian Journal of Hospital Pharmacy (CJHP) for as long as those of us on the Editorial Board can remember. We believe that the benefits of achieving indexing in MEDLINE are enormous. First, indexing will provide more exposure for the work of authors who publish in the CJHP. That is, authors’ articles will be more widely disseminated and more readily available to other clinicians and scientists around the world, who can then incorporate this new knowledge into their practice or build on the published work. Second, indexing will lead to more high-quality submissions. I have heard from more than a few of my academic colleagues who work in a “publish or perish” environment that they do not submit papers to the CJHP because “it is not indexed”. Once we achieve indexing status, however, authors will receive more recognition, more citations, and higher impact for their published papers and therefore will be more likely to submit their high-quality work to CJHP. Third, indexing is expected to improve the value of the Journal not only for authors but also for readers, subscribers, advertisers, and its owner, the Canadian Society of Hospital Pharmacists (CSHP), for all the reasons described above. If you have searched PubMed recently, you may have noticed that you are already able to retrieve citations of articles published in the CJHP. This is because the Journal was successful in its 2010 application for archiving in PubMed Central (PMC), the US National Institutes of Health’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). PMC is part of the larger PubMed service, which also includes MEDLINE, the primary international online bibliographic citation database of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PubMed now includes a link to the material that CJHP has available on the PMC site. This is great news, but PMC archiving is only one step toward indexing. That is, at the PubMed site, CJHP citations are denoted as “PubMed – in process” or “PubMed”. Only after the CJHP is indexed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) will it say “PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE”. Currently, about 5000 journal titles are indexed in MEDLINE. The Director of the NLM decides whether or not to index a journal, on the basis of considerations of both scientific quality and policy. Specifically, the NLM’s Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC) reviews and assesses the quality of journals, while NLM’s Board of Regents determines the mix of types of journals to be indexed, according to considerations of program relevance. In fact, our Journal was indexed in MEDLINE over the period 1975 to 1997. While the specific reasons for halting our indexing are unknown, the NLM has been known to drop currently indexed journals to accommodate new ones. In 2004, the CJHP submitted an application for indexing that was unsuccessful. Although we would have been allowed to reapply after a minimum of 3 years, the Editorial Board believed it best to hold off until we were more confident of success. As such, we have been “beefing up” the Journal, while carefully examining the NLM’s criteria for indexing and scrutinizing what it took for other journals to achieve indexing status. I would like to take this opportunity to describe some of the additional changes we are planning for the CJHP and to explain why we are advocating these changes and why we believe we can be successful in our effort to achieve indexing status. In planning for our next application for indexing (in early 2015), we have adopted the following primary goals: (1) to improve the CJHP’s scope and coverage, making the Journal more internationally relevant; (2) to continue improving the quality of the CJHP’s review articles, clinical research papers, case reports, and editorials; (3) to further improve the LSTRC’s perception of the strength and credibility of the CJHP’s Editorial Board and the Journal’s editorial independence; (4) to