Importance of Publication Audit, fast track processing and categorization of manuscripts

Publication audit is a very useful tool to evaluate progress of a journal and plan for the future.1 We have been doing this exercise for the last quite a few years.. During the Year 2016 we received 1703 manuscripts of which three hundred twenty one were published, 1386 were not accepted for further processing due to various reasons, two were rejected because of plagiarism while twelve were withdrawn by the authors. Majority of the manuscripts from Pakistan as expected were submitted from Karachi (116) followed by Lahore (87) and Islamabad (26). Table-I, Table-II, Table-III. It must be mentioned here that we only screen those manuscripts for plagiarism which are accepted for further processing after initial internal review but before they are sent for external review. Some of these authors are advised to rewrite their manuscripts to reduce the similarity index score to come within acceptable limit of less than 20% before they are accepted for further processing. Original articles were the largest category of manuscripts published during 2016(Table-IV). Details regarding the name of the countries from which we received manuscripts published during the Year 2016 are given in Table-V. Last ten year’s analysis shows that our acceptance rate has constantly reduced from 50% in 2006 to just about under 20% in 2016. In fact it has remained within 20% over the last many years simply because we have an ever increasing number of submissions thus providing us an opportunity to be selective and accept only high quality manuscripts relevant Publication Audit