Dear Colleagues,

As you know, English has become (since a long time ago) the international language of Sciences. However, as you may know, this could be a severe limitation to increase the international visibility of the work done in developing countries because the work would have to be published in a major English speaking journal, indexed at Medline, adding barriers to important work done in our countries. In the Internet era, with the open access initiatives, search engines as scholar google seems to be changing  this equation and some initiatives (regional initiatives) such as Scientific Electronic Online Journals (http://www.scielo.org) are doing a tremendous and serious work indexing journals in native language (Spanish or Portuguese) that have international standards.

I suppose there similar initiatives for Asia, Africa or other continents.

Would it be reasonable  to only accept papers to our journals that, — in addition to the traditional search in Medline— are included in a regional search index?

In this case, what would be the adequate regional and international index besides Medline for each continent with non–English-speaking population?

Since students of medicine tend to initiate a search in a search engine and not in a database (which has barriers of access as cost or availability), would it be possible to make international recommendations about it and set some standards?

Carlo V Caballero-Uribe
Editor, Salud Uninorte
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Dear Colleagues,

I absolutely agree with Dr. Carlo about the problems regarding the language of indexes. I am glad about the efforts of the SCIELO project.

BUT: I consider anyway that we DO need an international language and that it is an important achievement of today's science. In my opinion, an international language helps us to communicate to each other, just imagine WAME list…I consider that we need both, international indexes (with an international common language), regional indexes, and even local indexes in our local languages.

I think that we cannot publish papers without a search and references to local papers, and we would find these local papers only in local indexes. It is impossible to imagine a Chinese (or any other country) researcher who ignores those local papers outside the international search engines. It is our job to guarantee logical policies for our journals according to our local requirements. For non–English-speakers, I think that rather than a possibility, it is a must to accept papers with searches beyond the borders of MEDLINE.

Regional indexes could be helpful, but the big problem is that Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania have hundreds of official languages. Which one would be the "regional" language? It is the same question about the egg and the chicken, and we would still need to select an "international language."

As a final point, the problem of medical student research is a very old one. My editor experience is exactly with medical students, and I have found a solution to this problem: Medical Students need to be mindful and use ALL the resources that are offered for FREE. Even in our "all commercial" world, there is a lot of information you can get for free. The HINARI program is a good resource for medical students in developing countries; it offers access to more than 300 journals in up to 113 countries.

Rodolfo R Soca
Former General Director, Cuban Journal of Medical Students
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I think we need more debate about it.

Recently, PLos medicine had a debate about if online international journals made local journals obsolete (http://medicine.plosjournals.org/archive/1549-1676/3/8/pdf/10.1371_journal.pmed.0030359-S.pdf).

It was very interesting to read a point of view of Gerd Antes, a German editor, discussing the poor impact factor of German speaking journals and telling that most heath care professionals are still not able (or willing) to read English—having the same problems as journals in the developing world.

Also, Elizabeth Slade thinks that "international journals" not are really international but something as friendship logia of Scientifics around the world that publish only its interests or the interest of just a reduced world. The article says that so called "'international’" journals are “rarely international in their content, readership or editorial boards.”

So I think the debate would be a two way one. Indeed, we need policies for our authors to always include  searches in accredited regional indexes as Scielo.

Or Bireme-Lilacs, (http://www.bvsalud.org) but maybe those international journals have to include policies for authors with a more expanded vision of the world that know can  easily obtain information on the Internet also in accredited and quality regional indexes besides the traditional Medline/PubMed search.

Carlo V Caballero-Uribe
Editor, Salud Uninorte
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Although it is in English, we have our own index for Australian medical literature. The Australian Medical Index is available through the National Library of Australia.

http://www.nla.gov.au/ami/

John S Dowden
Editor, Australian Prescriber
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Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE) constructed KoreaMed (http://koreamed.org) and KomCI Web (http://komci.org) similar to the PubMed system. At first, the journal should be evaluated with some criteria by KAMJE. If the journal is passed, it is indexed in KoreaMed. Also the citation database is constructed. KoreaMed provides English abstracts only, although the full text language of most journal is Korean. 

I suggest that regional databases should be able to proivde English abstracts although full text in their own languages would be widely used in the world. Since it is allowed for googlebot to crawl KoreaMed, it is easy to search KoreaMed content on the web. Therefore, although the papers are not indexed in PubMed, they can easily be searched by researchers .

Shuh
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Dear Colleagues,

Regional Indexing Biomedical Journals published in Eastern Mediterranean Region is available in: http://emrmedex.com/index.asp

Statistical contents of the site are as below:

Number of Countries: 4
Number of Journals: 63
Total Number of Issues: 1418
Total Number of Articles: 17176

Reza Gharebaghi
Former Editor, Dard Medical Journal