At March 11, 2015, confirmation letter reaches the editorial office of Annals of Palliative Medicine (APM) that the journal is indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE and all APM articles (back issues included) will be searchable in PubMed as soon as the indexation process is finished.
MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine® (NLM) premier bibliographic database and the primary component of PubMed®. PubMed has over 23 million references while 21 million of which are records from MEDLINE. As a free resource developed and maintained by the the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the NLM, PubMed is readily updated and is the most frequently used resource for information in the biomedical field. (2)
Annals of Palliative Medicine (Ann Palliat Med; Print ISSN 2224-5820; Online ISSN 2224-5839) was launched in April 2012 as a peer reviewed, open access journal published quarterly. The current Editors-in-Chief are Dr. Charles B. Simone II (Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Zhi-hua Zhu (Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center). The journal publishes articles of specific fields including, but not limited to, symptom management (pain, fatigue, vomiting, delirium, etc), palliative treatment and care in different diseases (cancer, AIDS, and other diseases), and in young people and elderlies, end-of-life health care, decision making etc., and provides current and practical information on palliative medicine.
With great efforts made by the distinguished Editors-in-Chief including the formal Editor-in-Chief, editorial board members, authors and the whole editorial team, APM has now published 12 issues in the past three years, including two special issues. Special issue is one of the features of the journal considering that it benefits our readers with a whole focused topic, making the reading more efficiently. The first special issue of 2015, part I of "Early Palliative Care” is to be published in July, contributed by leading experts sharing the development and experience of different countries. The outline to the special issue is provided (Table 1). The second part focusing on education and training of early palliative care is to be published followed.
Table 1
Recently, 3 special columns have been established respectively on "Palliative Radiotherapy”, "Surgical Palliative Care” and “Pain Management”.
"Palliative Radiotherapy Column” was launched in October 2014, led by Prof. Edward L.W. Chow (Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre) and Dr. Stephen Lutz (Blanchard Valley Regional Cancer Center). Both of the column editors are leading experts in palliative radiotherapy who have gathered a group of experts as a palliative radiotherapy subcommittee to make the column excellent. To better understand palliative radiotherapy as a growing subspecialty, please refer to APM editor's interview with Dr. Stephen Lutz in https://www.amepc.org/apm/article/view/5643/6440. (3)
"Surgical Palliative Care Column” is established by Dr. Geoffrey P. Dunn (University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center), launched in January 2015. As the formerly Chairman of the Surgical Palliative Care Task Force of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), it is hopeful that Dr. Dunn would gather more surgeons interested in the field of palliative care to make the column more informative.
“Pain Management Column” is to be launched in June 2015, to be chaired by Dr. Salahadin Abdi (The University of Texas) and Dr. Sebastiano Mercadante (University of Palermo). For the consecutive feature of regular columns and that column articles receive high frequency of accessing in short release, the journal aims to launch more columns led by leading experts in a certain fields.
With the indexation of the journal in PubMed/MEDLINE, high quality column articles as well as special issues of APM would receive much higher exposure to clinicians and researchers of the field. High exposure of the journal would then encourage contribution from more clinicians and research, to make the journal more excellent. It is hopefully that the journal would develop into a influential publication in short term with all the support.
Reference
- https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html
- Falagas ME, Pitsouni EI, Malietzis GA. Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses. The FASEB Journalvol. 22 no. 2 338-342. doi: 10.1096/fj.07-9492LSF. https://www.fasebj.org/content/22/2/338.full
- Zhong NQ. Stephen T. Lutz: Palliative Radiotherapy, a growing subspecialty. Ann Palliat Med 2015;4(1):43-45. doi: 10.3978/j.issn.2224-5820.2015.01.07
Nancy Q. Zhong,
Senior Editor, Annals of Palliative Medicine,
Editorial Office, AME Publishing Company, Guangzhou 510220, China.
Email: apm@amepc.org