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Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery, Vol. 36, No. 1, Jan-June, 2003, pp. 3 Editorial Mukund Thatte Editor, Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery Code Number: pl03001 Dear Readers, I am honoured that the members of The Association of Plastic Surgeons of India have given me this opportunity to edit the Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery. I hope that I am equal to the faith that they repose and to the task at hand. I am aware of the enormous task ahead and will try to achieve certain goals in my tenure. Indian plastic surgery is today poised for exponential growth. From a humble beginning where we had seven founder members we now are poised to cross the magical figure of one thousand in a few years. This implies that we will soon exceed a certain critical mass in terms of numbers. But the numbers alone do not suffice. In the past we have not exerted enough to influence the academic bodies that shape the curricula and training programmes in our speciality. Unlike in Britain and the US our Association has never successfully lobbied to be involved in the University training system or developed any specialist advisory committees ourselves. Our journal is also not representative of the enormous work that our members do nor has it had the required exposure to the international scientific community. Towards this end we are now making several changes. Starting from July 2003 we are going onto web based manuscript management (http://journalonweb.com/ijps). Members and in fact any interested contributor can now submit their article online at our site. It will be dealt with swiftly and transparently through the peer review process and accepted, returned for modification or rejected in a time bound manner. The contributor too will be able to track his/her article online. We hope to attract more international and national participation due to the ease of using this system. The text also will be published on an international website to improve exposure. In addition with immediate effect we are being indexed with Thomson Gale, USA in the following databases: Health & Wellness Research Center, Health Reference Center Academic, InfoTrac One File and Expanded Academic ASAP. EBSCO Publishing, USA has also agreed to include our journal in their electronic databases. We have also acquired the services of a professional publisher Messrs. Medknow Publications that was one of the strong recommendations of my predecessor Prof. Pramod Kumar. To return to the subject of the quality of the papers we must realise that each dissertation submitted for the Mch exam is a possible worthy paper as long as the guides ensure that rigorous methods are applied. Also clinical conditions common to the subcontinent and on which considerable work is done within the country are not properly reported. Members and academic heads need to help the journal in this respect. India is not only a land of exotic case reports or `me too' studies. We do a lot of good work; our numbers are some of the highest in the world, we need to document our work meticulously, learn from our experience and distil it into coherent useful and internationally acceptable original studies. So please ---go for it and make India proud---let us not deny ourselves our legitimate place under the sun. Mukund Thatte Editor, Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery Copyright 2003 - Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery. |
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