I 100% agree with you. If the universities consider only the Pubmed indexed journals, the scope to publish research work will be narrowed and indexations other than Pubmed will become virtually useless for the researchers. I am chief editor of a Pubmed indexed journal (J Ayub Med Coll) and also another non-Pubmed indexed (Pak J Physiol), We receive much more than our publishing limitations for JAMC and are practically overloaded. The valued authors have to wait a long time before their work is finally published. This affects their promotion time. Here in Pakistan, though the publications in Pubmed indexed journal is preferred, but publication in any of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) and Pakistan Medical & Dental Council (PMDC) recognised journal is accepted for promotion purposes. Recently the HEC has imposed condition of 'impact factor' journals which is causing restlessness among the researchers as many of them cannot afford publishing in the 'impact factor' journals being out of their affordable publication cost/fees. To me, publishing must be encouraged, but not restricted to Pubmed indexed or 'impact factor' journals.

Dear Dr. Muhammad Ayub Sir,

Thank you so much for the excellent comment as a chief editor and scientist. We need to discuss this issue very seriously. Hope other scientists also will share their point of view.

There are similar regulations about publication in indexed journals in the other country too and there are rules for promotion based on the publication but many other rules exist to adjust the effect of publication.

If I go for a summary:

1. PubMed is good for making a paper "Visible"

2. Impact Factor (ISI/Thomson Reuters) is good to show the formal "Usage" of a "Journal" in the literature (not necessarily the IMPACT and not necessarily one paper)

None of these shows the quality or real contribution to science because:

PubMed is mainly consists of MEDLINE and PubMed Central (PMC) and the criteria that any of these two resources use for inclusion of a journal have nothing to do with quality of the published work or the quality of the researcher. For example if you start publishing a journal in biomedical fields and could provide PDF and PMC-XML for your papers, the journal could be indexed in PMC and as the result it will be visible in PubMed. It is similar for MEDLINE, if you could consider some criteria that MEDLINE asks, the journal get indexed in MEDLINE too. I know MEDLINE- or ISI- or PMC-indexed journals that publish any paper after receiving a little money. So, it might be a promotion by payment!

Also it is the 'journal' that gets indexed and indexing the journal does not mean that my 'paper' had good quality.

I think the decision for promotion of a researcher should be based on a multi-factorial evaluation considering contribution of researcher to science or technology or practice (a change even small one), feedback from students, patents, knowledge translation, popularization of science, linking the academia and industry, getting grants from outside the university, continuous education, collaboration with other institutes and research team outside the university, region or even country, etc.

Hello, there is an ever-lasting debate on this topic. Usually, the main fact behind advocating PubMed is the quality of the journal. It is a well-known fact that recently a number of open-access journals are coming out and they publish articles taking the article processing charge. If we see and evaluate those articles critically, we will find some of the greatest disasters that are being imposed to the scientific communities. The articles published in those little-known/unknown journals are poorly designed, bloomed with fabricated data and results are largely misinterpreted/not interpreted properly. I am not saying that all the authors who submit papers to such journals do this, but there is a proneness to follow some scientific misconducts. This practice is rarely diagnosed by those journals because either the journals do not have qualified editorial board and reviewers or do not follow the standard of peer-reviewing. Now, when someone tries to find out research papers of his/her interest and finds such articles, there is largely great mismatch of results and interpretation.

The reason to choose a PubMed indexed journal is that we can be assured that if the journal is indexed, it is maintaining a minimum quality required to authenticate the findings of a research work. And, when we think to submit articles to those journals, we must assure the quality of data that we are going to present, we must assure that what we are interpreting will be judged by experts of that field globally. Secondly, the readers, who actually read the articles should not throw the paper to dustbin with a grudge. But, in context to PubMed, there are some other criteria also that may be followed without compromising with the quality, such as SCOPUS, a bibliographic database of ELSEVIER. All the journals (those of the ELSEVIER company) are indexed in SCOPUS although you may not find many of those in PubMed, but they are having good indexing rate, citation rate (you may find it by the journal's impact factor or Scimago journal citation index).

The bottom line is that if we are really doing an original research (original in the sense of the originality of the data), we should send this to a journal from where we can get some criticism (positive and negative as well). This helps us to modify the paper as per the demand of the readers. If you see the Instruction page of leading journals like The LANCET, you will find that there is written one line like this, the reviewers are the first readers, so we need to satisfy them first. It's all about quality that we desire.

Hi Bryan, I completely agree with you. Obviously, the best way to get rid of such issues is that if we continue our research practice without compromising the quality. It's all about us who are responsible for the data. Second is our trusted colleagues with whom we can share our ideas. This discussion is very health and we must apprehend the necessity of such, not only to get interacted with our colleagues around the globe but also we can find our peers who can intersect our pieces through all possible ways.

Well I think criteria must be a bit relaxed....already very few people are motivated for research and people would want more promotion and encouragement..

 May ALLAH help us all aameen

It was really encouraging to read you all. Recently we also went through this coax during our promotions. Our university honours PUBMED as the other esteemed institutions but the Medical Council of India relaxes the criteria of medical teacher's promotion by includingfour other indexing agenies as well...however I agree that individually we must conform to honest research and try publishing with the most acclaimed relevant journal so that the feedback  (even if negative! ) helps us learn and progress.

Dear chief editor Journal of Ayub Medical College --Pakistan

are you overloaded???? just 4 issue in a year. hahaha 

there are pubmed indexed  journals publishing two issues in a month with a single room office and couple if good IT guys. 

pathetic response time/ poor editorial management every thing pathetic

The PubMed index is a joke.

The entire PubMed archive since 1958 is a joke.

Corruption around vitamin C can be read in

http://medcraveonline.com/JCCR/JCCR-08-00272.php

The NIH will not allow CardioRetinometry® or anything about vitamin C to be published that might damage pharmaco-medical profits.it

Hollenhorst (Of Hollenhorst Plaque fame) complains about lack of (published) research

Yet CardioRetinometry® is the preventive medicine of the future and the first graduate Doctor of CardioRetinometry® will start practice after May 2017.

Until then what is the use of consulting doctors about hearts who are going to die of the same heart disease as their patients? How can the fraud continue?

Can´t you see the BLACK HOLE in research. No 10 and 20 grams vitamin C papers, IV papers liposomal vitamin C papers! ? Read Nobellist Linus Pauling and Matthias Rath´s work and wonder - why has their work never been properly followed up? Why is CardioRetinometry® suppressed? Why is the corrupt cardiology coronary Grade Zero allowed to continue? Why aren´t the leaders of the medical profession in prison for malfeasance and genocide? A billion at least have died too soon. Dosn´t half a century of trying to prove the cholesterol nonsense discredit medicine?

Publication in a PubMed indexed MedLine indexed journal discredits the honesty of all papers. It is now so bad. Google is making the literature more truthful.

My paper in the brave, honest, journal (http://medcraveonline.com/JCCR/JCCR-08-00272.php) blows the lid off the scam that medicine and pharmacy have been running since 1958 and in various ways since the 1920s, even before Vitamin C was isolated and long before Nobellist Albert Szent-Gyrogyi said he felt that "right from the start the medical profession misled the public" I know at least twelve authorities who entirely agree.

Prof of surgery Dr Kenneth Walker MD says CardioRetinometry® deserves a Nobel Prize. Laugh! Even Denham Harman was denied it because he drew too much attention to vitamin C when discovering Free radicals (Nov 1954) When I asked the BMJ if they would like a paper or letter offering CardioRetinometry® studies to prove the value of Statins and avoid overdose, they refused. Asked about publishing Scurvy - they refused. ONE mention of Occult Scurvy in 26,000,000,000 PubMed papers yet you reading this and everyone else on Earth suffers from it at some time and most people, most of the time.  Medicine and vaccines were discredited years before Wakefield..

I made a mistake saying one mention of  Occult Scurvy in PubMed, the index to defend pharmaco-medical profits. I put 26,000,000,000 papers. It should, of course have been 26,000,000 papers. Fortunately Google Scholar is catching up to find more peer reviewed papers that PubMed dares not print. PubMed & Wikipedia.discredited.

Dear Muhammad Aleem Khan

By 'overloading' we mean excess of contributions from authors on limited number of publishing articles. We at JAMC publish only 4 issues yearly. The JAMC grew from 30 pages per issue to over 250 pages in only 3 years. We receive more than 1200 articles in a year and only ~200 articles are finally published. Due to our limitations we cannot increase our frequency of publication or number of articles per issue. This makes us 'overloaded', our rejection rate crosses over 80% and accepted articles have to wait longer for publication. I hope you will now change your opinion of us being 'lazy' for any reason. We are sorry if any of your article had problem with JAMC, but we trust you will appreciate our help to valued contributors with no compromise on quality!

Pubmed index journals are recognized by HEC?? Please guide.

Many predatory journals and their articles have been listed in PubMed, therefore, only listing in PubMed is not a good indicator of being a legitimate journal.

Dear Jiban Shrestha ,

It is important to make a clear distinction between what we mean with PubMed indexing. As far as I see it there are basically three ways:

1. The journal is indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed

2. The journal is open access and indexed in PMC (PubMedCentral) or is linked to other services (like http://www.fao.org/about/en/ ) and is included in EuropePMC like the "Journal of Cereal Science"

3. Individual papers are included in PubMed, since the policy of PubMed is to include papers authored by at least one author with a NIH grant

I would be interested to see whether you have an example in mind of the first indexing group. Obviously, there are numerous examples of predatory journal that misleadingly mention PubMed included papers (while it is ‘just’ because they fall into group 3). I know of one example in ‘group 2’ “Bioinformation” (https://bioinformation.net/ ) an ESCI indexed journal that is (I estimate) wrongfully included in the stand-alone version of the Beall’s list (https://beallslist.net/standalone-journals/).

As far as see it PubMed is the least ‘polluted’ index when it comes to (potential) predatory journals. Obviously, its limitation is the scope of the journals (those active in law, literature, economics etc. cannot be indexed regardless their quality). Since no indexing service (including Scopus and Clarivate's SCIE) is flawless it is indeed better to rely on multiple criteria.

Best regards.

PS. Interestingly enough the bitterness flushed in some of above replies when it comes to PubMed is from someone who seriously talks about “the brave, honest, journal” which is published by MedCrave, a notorious predatory publisher, not only mentioned in the Beall’s list (https://beallslist.net/), but with countless more red flags: http://flakyj.blogspot.com/search/label/Medcrave

Then again it is published by someone who claims to be affiliated with “the Cosmopolitan University” according to https://www.university-directory.eu/United-States/Cosmopolitan-University.html (if even existing) a “not accredited institution” linked to yet another (imaginary) institute “Institute of CardioRetinometry” Both addresses render either a somewhat sad looking apartment and a windmill. By the way, this man seems to be banned from a respected expert society (https://www.opticianonline.net/news/oo-guilty-of-misconduct).