Divakar Goli*

Editor

*Corresponding Author:
Divakar Goli
Editor

Abstract

Dear Readers,

It is with immense prudence and humility that I accepted the responsibility of the IJPS editor and I thank the members of Indian Pharmaceutical Association for reposing faith in me and electing me as the editor of the prestigious IJPS in the platinum jubilee year of the association. My predecessor Dr. Rao Vadlamudi, presently the President of IPA brought the journal almost single handedly to a level of prestige with his untiring work for a period of two decades. I profusely thank him for his constant support and guidance in grooming me into the editor′s position of IJPS. I am sure you will all agree with me that getting into his shoes is a Herculean task.

I would appeal to all the authors, reviewers, subscribers, readers and well-wishers to enhance your support to the journal and help propagating the cause of IJPS and IPA. This journal has regained its periodicity and continues that trend due mainly to the efforts put in by Dr. Vadlamudi and Dr. Chandrashekhar Barhate. The journal acknowledges the assistance of Dr. Manjunath P. Mudagal, Dr. Gurubasavaraja Swamy, Dr. Suresh Janadri, Mr. Ganesh Andhale and Mr. Anudeep Balla in clearing the backlog and enhancing productivity. Also the editorial assistants Ms. Shyli Makula and Ms. Chethana Reddy Nethani very ably support the journal by handling all submitted manuscripts in a timely manner. Still the time taken for reaching a final verdict is fairly long for IJPS, which is inevitable since the journal receives more than 1200 submissions in a year. From this year, IJPS will initiate the ‘‘Ahead of Print’’ publication of approved article online rapidly to improve visibility of articles and to reduce the time taken for revised articles to get published.

Journals have long been ranked by their journal impact factor arrived at by the average number of citations per article in the preceding two years. However, that system appears to have certain loopholes, which have helped several recent origin journals claiming and attaining higher impact factors. The h-index proposed by Jorge Hirsche in 2005 serves as an alternative to the customary journal impact factor in appraising the impact of research by a particular research scientist or journal. The h-index quantifies scientific productivity and the impact of a Journal based on the set of most quoted papers published in that journal and the number of citations that these papers received in other publications. For example, a journal with an h-index of 25 has published at least 25 papers that have each had at least 25 citations out of the total papers published by the journal. Thus, a higher h-index indicates more publications that have been cited more often. This index is a better indicator since it takes into account the uneven weight of highly cited papers or papers that have no citations. With an h-index of 34 for the year 2013, the IJPS is top ranked among all Indian journals in the field of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and occupies 3rd rank in Asia and 44th rank in the world.

In the near future IJPS would expect to put in order a seminar cum workshop for the advantage of authors and reviewers on how to prepare a script for assent to scientific journals. Please send your opinions and suggestions at editor.ijps@ipapharma.org / ijps.ipa@ gmail.com

I would express my gratitude to all the authors, reviewers, all members of the editorial team, the advisory board and the editorial board of IJPS, all the office bearers and the staff of IPA secretariat and the Medknow/Wolters Kluwer Health personnel for their support in bringing out yet another volume of IJPS and look forward to their unrelenting support to bring out the Volume 77 of IJPS in scheduled time.