In February 2013, I received a message from a database that the Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions (JEEHP) was reviewed for its inclusion in the database. The following are representative of the comments received: Citedness is below expectations; There is no international diversity among authors; Only one issue is published per year; Author instructions need to be described in greater detail. Among our responses to these comments, revised instructions to authors will take effect on May 1, 2013 so that the papers beginning in May 2013 conform to the revised instructions. JEEHP follows Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication (http://www.icmje.org/) if otherwise not described in the instructions to authors; however, instead of simply following the Uniform Requirements, there are several stipulations that would be worth explicitly specifying in the instructions to authors. The three most important changes to the instructions to authors are moving from a non-structured to a structured abstract, requiring a digital object identifier (DOI) at the end of each reference, and requiring the authors’ explanation of their paper in an audio recording of the author speaking or video recording in their mother tongue or in English. A structured abstract has gradually become the rule rather than the exception in medical journals. Structuring an abstract with sections such as Purpose, Methods, Results, and Conclusion, not only provides more systematic information to readers, but assists authors in determining the most important content to include in the abstract. Since most researchers are too busy to read the full text of papers, they usually read only abstracts. A concise and lucid purpose and conclusion in the abstract will lead readers to move to the full text when they find it particularly relevant. Audio or video descriptions of the contents will also increase access to the content for those with disabilities, who share the author’s mother tongue, or who simply enjoy learning in a different modality. Making the audio or video streaming of the authors available on the homepage will promote the content of the papers to internet visitors. Although JEEHP is an international journal indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, and CINAHL, the number of submissions has remained rather small. In 2012, I received 33 unsolicited manuscripts, and the acceptance rate was 36.4%. The published paper’s authors were from Korea, Nepal, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Fiji, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The 2012 SCIE impact factor manually calculated from Web of Science was 1.222 when only citable papers such as reviews, research articles (original articles), and brief reports were considered. This value is expected to increase year by year. It has been possible by the help of worldwide good reviewers. JEEHP is an online only journal with volume (year) and article number but no issue number. It is not yet possible to publish this journal with multiple issues that can be easily seen in print journals, since the papers are published as soon as possible after acceptance. Beginning in 2013, social network services such as Facebook or Twitter links, QR codes, Pubreader, and an app for the iPad were added. A mobile web version of JEEHP will appear soon. This year, CrossMark, Fundref, and ORCID provided by CrossRef will be introduced to JEEHP. I will do my best to solicit more manuscripts from a variety of countries to provide invaluable information to medical health professionals worldwide. JEEHP has the merits of gold open access according to the Creative Commons Attribution License and no article processing charge on the author side, two significant incentives to researchers to select JEEHP as a journal for submission. Being indexed in a variety of international databases might be an even greater incentive. This year, JEEHP reached its tenth year of publication. The most recent revision of the instructions to authors is just one more step in a decade-long effort to reach the goal of becoming an outstanding journal focused on disseminating the latest knowledge on educational evaluation across the health professions and around the world.
