Publication Audit - a useful tool to evaluate progress and plan for the future

Publication audit is considered a useful tool to evaluate the progress and plan for the future and we have been doing this exercise for the last couple of years.1-3 A careful look at the statistics for the Year 2014 reveals that there has been an increase in the number of submissions, a trend seen for the last few years consecutively. During the Year 2014, 1577 manuscripts were received from different countries. Table-I. A vast majority of the submissions were from China 524 followed by Turkey 441, Pakistan 255, Islamic Republic of Iran 107 and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 88. As regards submissions from Pakistan as expected most of the submissions were from Karachi 97 Lahore 40, Hyderabad and Peshawar 21 each while submissions from Islamabad and Rawalpindi were 18 and 17 respectively. Table-II. A total of three hundred one manuscripts were published during 2014 (acceptance rate of 19.8%) ten were rejected because of plagiarism while thirty manuscripts were withdrawn by the authors for various reasons. Table-III. A vast majority of the published manuscripts during 2014 included original articles 248 followed by case reports 20 and Review articles ten. Table-IV. Among the published manuscripts ninety three were from Pakistan, eighty nine from China, sixty from Turkey and nineteen from Saudi Arabia. Table-V. The number of submissions increased to 1577 in 2014 from 1023 in 2012 and 1091 in the Year 2013. Most of the submissions during 2012 and 2013 were also from Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and China and this has seen a continuous increase in the number Publication Audit