Situación editorial de las Revistas Latinoamericanas de Enfermedades Respiratorias

Abstract

To analyze the present situation of respiratory diseases journals published in Latin America, editors of seven of these journals were convoked to a meeting organized by ALAT (Latin American Association of Thoracic Diseases) at Lima, Peru, on February 4th, 2007. As a complement to each editor report, a survey was answered by each one of them on how to get published more and better manuscripts in their journals. According to them the main motivations of national respiratory societies from Latin American countries for editing their own respiratory journals is to improve information acquisition. Disseminate medical knowledge and communicate an experience, were considered by the editors as the main motivations of authors to submit papers. The most frequent deficiency of manuscripts received by their journals is bad adherence to journal's requirements for submitting manuscripts. An improvement in the relationship between author-editor-reviewer was mentioned by most of the editors (6 out of 7), as the mechanism to be used to enhance the quality of the manuscripts. Three of the 7 editors reported a decrease in the number of original papers submitted. They attributed such a decrease in first place to a high pressure for publishing in journals with the highest impact factor. Suggestions on how to improve the Latin American journals on respiratory diseases included to professionalize editorial work and to increase meticulousness of manuscripts reviewers, besides international norms for editing medical journal should be rigorously followed