Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences, 2015 at a glance

The Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences (IJBMS) is a peer‐reviewed, monthly publication by Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (Mashhad, Iran). It is currently indexed in major national and international scientific databases such as Science Citation Index (ISI), PubMed Central, Scopus, EMBASE, BIOSIS Previews (Biological Abstracts), and Chemical Abstracts (CA). An analysis of manuscripts submitted to the journal during 2013–2015 is presented in Figure 1. Examination of this figure shows an increase of 45% in submitted articles during 2015 compared to 2014. In 2015, around 30% of the published articles were from 14 countries including China, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Portugal, Thailand, Tunisia, Jordan, Taiwan, Colombia, Iraq, and Egypt. The main challenge of the journal in 2015 was manuscript withdrawal by the authors. In some cases, this happened even after the final acceptance of the articles. During the online submission of the articles, we require the authors to declare that they have not submitted their articles simultaneously to other journals. But, occasionally, the authors submit their articles to different journals at the same time without informing the editorial office. This has raised a big ethical issue for the editors of IJBMS. Another ethical issue is duplicate publication of articles. In some cases, the submitted articles have been published elsewhere prior to submission to IJBMS.