Seven years publication of “Iranian Journal of Radiation Research” with confident but cautious steps (Editor\'s Commentary)

The Iranian Journal of Radiation Research (IJRR) is now in the eighth year of publication. This journal is the mouth piece of shared idea of Dr Shahram Akhlaghpoor and me, which was established way back in 2002. At that time the main emphasis of the founder members was to make the subject of radiation research attractive and interesting especially for combating cancer and risk assessment. The dream for creating the Journal has come true by the help of Dr Seyed Mahmood Aghamiri who obtained the necessary permission for its publication and the Novin Medical Radiation Institute for financial and logistic supports. Our mission has been to serve the needs of scientists and community by working with capable researchers and professionals from across the world to produce the most accurate and up to date scientific and technical resources. From summer 2003 when the first issue of IJRR was published, IJRR was devoted to the rapid publication of fundamental research papers on all aspects of Radiation Research. All contributions were rigorously refereed and selected on the basis of quality and originality of the work as well as the breadth of interest to readers. Although for understanding reasons the authors were reluctant to publish their articles in the journal. From publication of the first issue, I, as the editor-in-chief with the help of all my colleagues, have tried to improve the quality and responsibility of the journal and its articles over the past years. Through this continued efforts we could index the journal with a host of indexing agencies and we are expecting to get higher impact factor for journal in a near future. Thus IJRR has now gained an international reputation and a strong emphasis on high academic standards. In addition to authors from Iran who contributed to IJRR, I should thank all the authors across the globe that helped us by submitting articles to this journal. I would like to thank to our editorial board for their help and suggestions, all reviewers for their sincere help and careful review of the articles and my colleagues at the editorial and publishing office. Also I express my special thanks and gratitude's to Dr Shahram Akhlaghpoor and his honorable colleagues at the Novin Medical Radiation Institute for their continued logistic and financial support to keep the journal alive and to Miranda Firouzbakhsh and Sohail Mozdarani for their tired less efforts at the editorial office to manage the articles from the first day of receipt until publication. Seven years is not a long time to assess a journal's worth. However, 7 years is also ample time when we should have been able to promote the journal to a greater height. Thus let us not to miss this opportunity now. The Iranian Journal of Radiation Research is now indexed in ISI, Scopus, Index Copernicus, EM base and etc, therefore, there should be no hesitation for researchers to put their valuable works in the journal and work for the journal to become more visible internationally. Young scientists are requested to contribute by submitting interesting observations, raising controversies and publish constructive criticisms on published articles as well as submitting original articles in the cutting edge areas of the radiation science. I request all the scientists and researchers in the field of radiation science to visit the journal website at www.ijrr.com. Apart from free access to abstracts and full text articles in PDF format, each article has its individual statistics of utility. You can see how often the website has been visited, how often articles in the journal have been visited and how often the PDF article has been downloaded. The impact factor and citations are two important indices for any journal and an individual article's utility. IJRR has now published enough papers in different fields of radiation research to be cited by authors in their forthcoming articles. However, I hope in the future, the number of times an article has been visited or PDF downloaded will also be used to understand the interest in a particular article by readers who do not publish articles. Visit and download of some articles published in IJRR is incredible. There are papers visited nearly 4000 times and downloaded more than 1300 times. These statistics and being indexed by main indexing agencies indicate the level of articles published in IJRR and its scientific importance in the short life of this journal. I am sure with all your help this journal will be able to immortalize itself.