To publish or perish
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EDITORIAL
To publish or perish J. H. van Krieken
Published online: 21 May 2013 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
This issue of the Journal of Hematopathology brings new articles, case reports and reviews. The aim of the journal is to bring relevant information to the readers and that remains an important aim for the authors too. But for many academic authors, writing is not only to bring ideas or data to others, but to have articles on their account to show to management that they perform well. There is a lot of attention for H-index, impact factors and other markers for quality. It seems to me that the focus on impact factor is too strong. We learn from articles, use books and go to meetings to keep up with developments in the areas we are most interested in. In the yearly workshop on clonality testing, we see that articles and lectures are certainly not enough to bring the information needed to do good clonality testing into practice. Because all participants bring their own cases and because they come from many different countries but all with expertise, one gets a good idea how Hematopathology is performed throughout the world. It is nice to see that most are well aware of what goes on the literature, but also that most top papers deal with not clinically relevant research. This is not a real problem as long as there is sufficient room
J. H. van Krieken (*) Department of Pathology, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
for articles that matter for clinical Hematopathology and routine practice. Such articles are plenty, but in journals that are not regarded “top” like Modern Pathology, the American Journal of Surgical Pathology, Histopathology and Virchows Archives, and of course the Journal of Hematopathology. These are not the articles that are cited the most, but are read and used the most. But downloading of articles is monitored but taken in to account in quality measures. So the system is based on the fact that being cited is more important than being read. The Journal of Hematopathology can be reached through subscription and Google Scholar, but not through PubMed. The reason is that the number of case reports is regarded too high and those are not seen as important. And I believe they are. This is a dilemma: not in PubMed, means not a lot of citations, and thus not attractive enough for authors to publish in. I hope that this situation will change, since the comments I get from readers is very positive. And in the end, it is the reader we really write for (I hope). Han van Krieken
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