A Comparative Analysis on the Trend of Submitted Manuscripts to “Iranian Journal of Public Health” During 2012-2014

In accordance with increasing trend of submitted and published papers in Iranian Journal of Public Health during the recent years, in 2014 we encountered a similar phenomenon. This editorial will present a bird eye view on comparison data released of journal during 2012-2014. The total number of manuscripts received during 2014 was 1756 from 59 countries. Obviously, Iran, the homeland of the Journal, has acquired the first rank of the list, followed by China and India (Table I). Figure 1 presents the total number of articles published during 2012-2014 in terms of article type. Out of total submission of 1756 articles during 2014, 1295 articles were rejected after initial in-house evaluation or later peer review. As previous years, some cases of plagiarism were detected and were treated according to the policy of the journal. Normally, authors of minor cases of plagiarism are given a chance to amend their manuscripts precisely but major cases are rejected. Unfortunately, the dilemma of plagiarism still occurs in a portion of submitted articles mostly sent from non-English native countries. The Journal follows a policy of in-house evaluation followed by double blind peer review system. As for foreigner authors we try to exert an open peer review system. The reasons for rejecting a manuscript during in-house evaluation are various but the most important cases are out of scope cases, poor outcome, local studies, clinical contents etc. Figure 2, demonstrates the total number of articles published during 2012-2014 in terms of the percent of acceptance and rejection rate. It is worth mentioning that some manuscripts submitted during 2014, are still in the process of peer review so we have no idea of their destination. This may cause some problems in reporting exact data. However, the rejection rate in 2014 was 73.7%. Good news is that the journal has been welcomed by many authors throughout the world but bad news is that now we have many papers in the queue of lay outing. The types of articles published during 2012-2014 are shown in Fig. 3. Accordingly, Original Articles have the highest rate of publication during the last three years. An increasing trend of published articles is obvious during 2012-14. Due to high flow of submitted manuscripts, in many cases, the authors were requested to change the format of " Original Article " to " Letter to the Editor " , which of course the merit of both formats …