The year that went by

Abstract

[...] there are a limited number of medical education journals. At the moment, the papers are indexed in the DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, JournalSeek, the Australian Education Index (only articles by Australians), Google search engine and Google Scholar. Since we began publication of the IJME in April 2010 a large number of people have accessed articles from the journal website.

The professional responsibilities of medical educators are usually grounded in the areas of teaching, research and practice aimed at improving the quality of health care systems. Medical educators have a fundamental role in teaching and clearly could play an important role in conducting pedagogical research studies. Such studies are the first steps in improving teaching and learning practices, evaluating educational programs and generating and testing educational theories.1 The key competencies that are required to successfully achieve these goals can be categorised into three different parts: 1) the ability to perform research to create new knowledge uptake, 2) The ability to effectively explain the study findings within the manuscript, demonstrating how new knowledge can be used, 3) The ability to disseminate manuscripts in peer-reviewed research journals. 2 The current medical education journals do not provide the opportunity for all medical educators across the world to disseminate their findings within the medical education community. There are two possible reasons for this. Firstly, there are a limited number of medical education journals. Secondly, there is a limited amount space available in these journals. Such a situation causes many worthwhile contributions to be declined. The International Journal of Medical Education (IJME) has been launched to disseminate internationally worthwhile contributions to gain a collective picture of the current status of medical education issues worldwide. Understanding globally pedagogical practices may contribute to internationalisation of medical education. Further information about the journal has been published elsewhere.3

We are working hard to index the journal in Medline/ PubMed. At the moment, the papers are indexed in the DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, JournalSeek, the Australian Education Index (only articles by Australians), Google search engine and Google Scholar. Since we began publication of the IJME in April 2010 a large number of people have accessed articles from the journal website. We have also received a large number of manuscripts from across the world for potential publication. The editor has submitted the manuscripts to meet the standards of the journal to the editorial board and other experts in the related field to review and for potential publication. It is important to mention that the editorial board of the journal along with other external reviewers spend their precious time to complete the review are volunteers to IJME. The reviewers are asked to evaluate each manuscript and to provide an overall decision. Based on usually two or three reviewers, the IJME editor then makes a decision to either invite the corresponding author to revise the manuscript or reject the manuscript. The vast majority of papers have been rejected either by the editor or by experts in the related fields. None of the manuscript received have not been rejected for poor English language or poor organisation. If a manuscript made a contribution to new knowledge with a sound methodology, we have asked the corresponding author to employ a native English speaking colleague to professionally edit the manuscript.

Our experience shows that most authors do not format the manuscript in accordance with the journal instructions. However, the papers received have not been rejected for incorrect format. Common reasons for rejecting manuscripts were: poor literature review, methodology flaws and lack of contribution to medical education.

Recommendations to Authors

The manuscripts submitted are precisely reviewed by the editorial board of the journal and external reviewers. Therefore, authors need to submit a manuscript which is scientifically rigorous. To achieve this, the Introduction should familiarise the reader with the phenomenon under investigation. In the Introduction, the knowledge that has already been created in the literature should be addressed with references. The knowledge that has not been presented in the literature provides the significance of the research question or hypothesis in the Introduction to the study report. Conducting a strong literature review on the phenomenon under study creates a strong knowledge base to conduct research and generates useful research objectives, questions or hypotheses. The Methods section should fully explain research design (approach to study), study participants, the process of sampling, data collection methods, reliability and validity of tools, data analysis methods and legal-ethical issues. The Results section should just focus on the findings of the study without any interpretation. The discussion should answer the research questions or hypotheses that have been posed in the Introduction. In addition, the answers should be supported by the study results and then should be interpreted in relation to previous studies. Unexpected results should be also discussed, even if they are not supported by the majority of earlier studies. The limitations of the study should be reported in the discussion section, such as self-report tools, single institution, low response rate and the lack of generalisation, owing to nonprobability sampling methods.

Finally, it is important for authors to carefully read the journal website, in particular "for authors" in order to format their manuscript according to the journal format. In summary, the purpose of this editorial has been to assist authors to provide an appropriate and successful manuscript for publishing in the IJME.

References

References

1. Tavakol M, Murphy R, Rahemei-Madeseh M, Torabi S. The involvement of clinicians in medical education research. Qual Prim Care. 2008;16(5):335-40.

2. Parasuraman A. Reflections on contributing to a discipline through research and writing. Journal of Academic of Marketing Science. 2003;31:314-18.

3. Dennick R. Welcome to the international journal of medical education. IJME. 2010;1:1.