Dear colleagues and friends of our journal, it is our great pleasure to announce that Biochemia Medica has fulfilled criteria for indexing and has entered the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition (JCR) bibliographic and citation databases, which cover more than 5,900 world’s leading scientific journals and provide numerous bibliographic information, abstracts and citations. Three issues starting from the first issue of Volume 17 (2007) are already included in SCIE and JCR databases. To be indexed in such prestigious and selective databases is a substantial achievement for every scientific journal and award to all who contributed to this success.
Let us briefly review the recent period of the last two and a half years, since new Editorial board has been appointed to the journal. From the very beginning of that new era of the life of our journal, manuscript submission rate has been constantly increasing, journal has been issued regularly, manuscript acceptance criteria have been considerably more stringent, which has resulted in a significant trend toward the higher manuscript rejection rate. As a consequence, the overall quality of the articles published inBiochemia Medica has been over this time substantially improved. Due to the growing interest and the flow of new submissions, journal has increased the number of issues per volume. Therefore, starting from this year, Biochemia Medica has three issues per volume: February, June and October.
Some world’s leading scientists and well known scholars publish in Biochemia Medica: prof. Ana and Matko Marušić, prof. Victor Blaton, prof. Mario Plebani, prof. Giuseppe Lippi, prof. Tomaš Zima, prof. Grazyna Sypniewska, prof. Rosa Isabel Sierra-Amor, prof. Patrick MM. Bossuyt, prof. Gabor L. Kovacs and many others.
Since the second issue in 2006, a new article category named Lessons in biostatistics has been added to the journal, with the aim to educate clinical chemists, physicians and other biomedical professionals on the basics in applied biostatistics. Some topics already introduced within Lessons are standard error, confidence interval, diagnostic accuracy and correlation & regression. Besides, Biochemia Medica continuously promotes some pertinent and relevant issues such as the role and significance of bibliographic databases, research integrity, impact factor, laboratory errors, accreditation and quality management, continuous education and many others.
During the 2007, Biochemia Medica was included for indexing in three new bibliographic databases: CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service), DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and EBSCO/Academic Search Complete. Being selected for indexing in some major databases is an important prerequisite for international visibility and recognition.
Our next goal is to become a cited journal and receive an impact factor, which provides a best available tool for benchmarking the quality of the journal. We shall continue to improve the quality of the articles and the journal, the number of articles published and the rapid publishing turnaround time.
Lastly, we certainly have to thank to all who contributed to this great success. Special thanks to the journal Executive Editors for being so enthusiastic and hard-working. Many thanks to our reviewers for their responsible task, which exerts the most powerful impact on the quality of the manuscript and the journal. Thanks to all members of the Editorial Board who have promoted the journal and encouraged potential authors to submit their work to Biochemia Medica. We also wish to thank to all our national and international authors and friends. This is our common success!