Journal of Medical Thesis: Adding new dimension to Publication of Thesis


Vol 4 | Issue 1 | Jan - Apr 2016 | page 1-2 | Shyam AK.


Author: Dr. Ashok K Shyam

MS Orthopaedics
Editor - Journal of Medical Thesis
Email: drashokshyam@yahoo.co.uk


Journal of Medical thesis (JMT) has entered in its fourth year of publication. This is a significant achievement in a country where thesis is something of a burden to most medical students. The aim of the journal was to increase the value of thesis and to provide an opportunity to students and medical faculty to publish their research. I believe JMT has definitely taken in steps in right direction to achieve these goals. We are now receiving submission from many countries and many contributors have shown great interest in publishing their thesis in entirety.
Thesis have been published in various other formats but mostly as part of a university repository where due credit in form of citations is mostly not credited to the thesis. Publishing the thesis is JMT has this significant advantage. All articles are indexed in google scholar and index Copernicus and citations can be received for the thesis. This adds academic value to the thesis and to contributors too, which repositories can't provide. Another advantage of publishing in JMT is that the articles have a wide outreach. The number of readers at JMT website has increased exponentially and now includes readers from more than fifty countries. We also have increased submissions from different faculties of medicine and in short time we will be looking at becoming a comprehensive medical journal which will include thesis from all faculties. We also aim to include the para-medical and para-clinical thesis in the purview of JMT to improve the comprehensiveness. Even with such large scope, there are strict criteria for inclusion into JMT and not many articles are published by us. In fact last year we published only one issue which is testament of our commitment to uphold quality of the journal.
We are planning a more organised approach for JMT in year 2016. We will be formulating a speciality based editorial board by the end of this year. We wish to invite readers who are interested to join JMT to write to us. This will help us get good peer review for subject wise thesis and improve the quality of the Journal. We have also submitted JMT to leading indexing bodies and will be indexed in all of them by the end of this year. We will also be printing every issue of JMT and will be distributing it to all medical colleges. Print copies of JMT will be available to all colleges on subscription basis however access to online version will remain open access. JMT fulfils the current requirement of MCI as it is available in print version and is indexed with Index Copernicus. But this it is not the main purpose of JMT to simply publish to help people get accreditation from MCI. The main aim remain to publish quality thesis which will serve as template to improve the quality of thesis in future.
Recently medical education in our country has come under lot of criticism specifically in terms of research and publications. We hope JMT will provide a good platform for student to read and publish quality material and in turn will improve the understanding of research and publications. With this is mind we are planning to introduce certain new features in JMT. We have already introduced the hypothesis section which will publish the hypothesis of thesis that have been approved by a medical university. This will help students get a publication to begin with and the literature review will help in improving their understanding about the subject. The hypothesis also undergo peer review and students may get new insights in their research from comment of the reviewers. Along with hypothesis we are planning to start a subject specific section where difficulties in thesis writing and publications will be discussed by teachers and researchers. Another permanent feature we are introducing is a 'Statistic article'. This will be a featured article preferable written by a research person or a statistician. These articles will be present complex statistical concepts in easier way for understanding of our students and new researchers. We are hopeful that these new feature will help in making JMT a more complete Journal. We are also open to suggestions from our readers about what more we can include in JMT.
The journey of four years for JMT is not been easy. The editorial team had to do lot of hard work and many thesis were rejected in peer review. The indexing was difficult to obtain and quality articles were even difficult. However the future of JMT looks really bright with many more submissions this year. The print version will help improve the outreach of the journal much more. The Journal of Medical Thesis still hold the status of being the only Journal in the world that is dedicated to publishing medical thesis and this fact has been acknowledged by increased visits to our website from all across the globe. We invite all researchers to publish their thesis in entirety with JMT and showcase their work on our platform. I sincerely thank our editorial board that has supported the journal I all these years.

Best Wishes
Dr Ashok Shyam
Editor- Journal of Medical thesis.


How to Cite this Article: Shyam A K. Journal of Medical Thesis: Adding new dimension to Publication of Thesis. Journal Medical Thesis 2016 Jan - Apr;  4(1):1-2.

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