- (2012) Volume 6, Issue 4
Deputy Editor, First Department of Nursing, Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Athens, Greece.
Six years have passed since the day a new academic journal published its first article under the leadership of Prof. Christina Marvaki. Starting with a small number of articles “Health Science Journal” has considerably grown over this past period, increasing both in size and quality.
Six years have passed since the day a new academic journal published its first article under the leadership of Prof. Christina Marvaki.
Starting with a small number of articles “Health Science Journal” has considerably grown over this past period, increasing both in size and quality.
Especially, during 2012, Health Science Journal has doubled its volume, compared to what it was when first established, reaching approximately 700 pages per year, while the submitted articles for publication each year exceeds the number of 80, the majority of which are original research papers.
Additionally, since 2009 there have been agreements with abstract and citation databases of literature research, such as Sciverse Scopus (Elsevier B.V.), Cinahl , EMcare , ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source etc. This fact made clear, that the journal was much needed to the world scientific community and subsequently led to a significant number of references and citations to the journal’s articles by high impact organizations and influential academic journals, such as the Center for Disease Control and the Journal of Advanced Nursing among others.
The journal during 2011 managed to acquire its first scientific impact indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator stands out among them. Developed by SCImago, SJR is a relatively new strong instrument for the evaluation of scientific journals. According to Falagas et al: “SJR indicator attributes a different weight to citations depending on the “prestige” of the citing journal without the influence of journal self-citations; prestige is estimated with the application of the PageRank algorithm in the network of journals” [1]. Other strong indicators such as SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) and H-index were also ascribed to the journal starting from 2010. The classic Cites per Doc index is also available every year through the same network. Cites per doc (2y) according to Scimago measures the scientific impact of an average article published in the journal, and it is computed using the same formula that journal impact factor ™ (Thomson Reuters) [2].
Thanks to an excellent editorial board and a significant number of reviewers, the editorial team believes that is how Health Science Journal managed to achieve its primary goals.
Those goals, as described in Health Science Journal’s first editorial article five years ago: “to supply quality articles, achieve a noteworthy presence on the Internet and reach the high quality and status, that will ensure that Health Science Journal becomes a high respected reference tool among health professionals and academics” [3].
