Is There Any Interest Among Iranian Biomedical Journals and Researchers to Publish a Letter to the Editors abstract
The letter to the editor or the correspondence letter is the most popular section of some scientific journals(1), providing an opportunity for the readers to state theirviewpoints to help clarify the scientific evidence recordedin the literature.Despite the intensive peer- review process, it is possibleeven in high quality journals to find an article withcertain errors in methodology part, statistical analysis andthe generalization of the results (2). Unfortunately, bothIranian biomedical journals (IBJs) and researchers are notinterested to publish letter to the editor (3). PubMed, Scopusand Google Scholar comprehensively investigated andconcluded that among 330268 published articles by Iranianauthors (until December 2015), only 3883 letter to theeditor werefound. Indeed, letter to the editor consists ofapproximately 0.01% of the articles published in IBJs. Thesmall number of letter to the editor in IBJs as comparedto other journals could be attributed to two main reasons:1. Readerships and researchers: In Iran, most researchersread abstracts and conclusions of the articles toobtain the information they need (3-5). Others may readthe full text, but do not have a critical overview and readan accepted article without appraising the content or assessingits quality. In addition, critical appraisal is routinelytaught to undergraduateandpostgraduate studentsand also to health care professionals inmanycountries (4);however, in Iran, it has not been properly embedded in thecurriculum of health and medical sciences. Accordingly,the small number of letter to the editor writing in IBJscould be attributed partly to the lack of critical appraisalskills among some
Iranian readers (3).2. Policies of
Iranian ministry of science (IMS) and IBJseditorial boards: Regarding current IMS regulations foracademic promotion, the letter to the editor and originalarticle have been scored between 0.5 - 1 and 5 - 7 (3, 6).Hence, there seems to be a little reward for academics tospend time on and effort in writing a letter to the editor .In some cases, the editorial board of IBJs believes thatthe letter to the editor as an article may damage the journalreputation. In fact, if the editorial board accepts the letter to the editor which points out the methodologicalerrors of a previously published article, it implicitly denotesthat publishing such an articlemaydamagethe journalreputation (7, 8).