From the Publisher’s Desk: The Journey of Success!

The International Journal of Recent Surgical and Medical Sciences (IJRSMS) was established in 2015 with the aim of helping students, researchers, and practicing clinicians share with the world their experiences with educational endeavors, clinical practice, and research. The journal was multi-disciplinary from the very beginning so that it could help potential authors from various clinical disciplines and enrich the knowledge of the readers alike.

After two years of its inception, the young editors of the journal, Dr. Shraddha Singhania and Dr. Sohael Khan, along with the Editor in Chief, Dr. Pradeep Singh, reached out to me as they were looking forward to joining a professional publishing house. I was, at the time, working for my previous publishing house. Our meeting turned out to be more personal than professional, as it was obvious that we shared the common goal of enriching medical minds with the ever-changing medical research information and contributing towards improvement of healthcare services. We decided to join hands, and I joined the journal. Since then, an exciting journey started, where we were working rigorously to publish the best content available from the nooks and corners of the country and overseas. My personal goal was to maximize the visibility and outreach of the journal so that students, and established researchers would know that there is a journal in which they can publish their research. They can rest assured that their content will be transparently evaluated, selected based on merit, and, if published, get national and global reach and recognition.

In the coming years, IJRSMS got recognition from the Directory of Open Access Journals, which further strengthened its commitment towards open access medical publishing. It meant that the journal started getting more and more submissions with diversified content, ranging from core surgical specialties and medicinal interventions to in-vitro and in-vivo laboratory research articles. The journal had just entered a phase where it had to work even harder with a more efficient production process and required an enhanced submission portal for the authors.

Around this time, in 2022, I moved into Scientific Scholar and IJRSMS followed my lead. This decision was not only based on my personal equation with the editors but because it also meant that the journal got a top-notch submission portal like Editorial Assist, the brainchild of Scientific Scholar. EditorialAssist is loaded with unlimited customizations and modern features. An additional advantage was a much more efficient production system, with a personal touch from the authors, reviewers, and editors. The journal owners experienced a personal approach from the house’s CEO Mr. Pritesh Sheth, who himself runs the IT division and ensures immediate troubleshooting, whenever there are author and reviewer queries, and a vastly improved production process efficiently led by Mrs. Krupa Sheth which ensured seamless processing and publishing of articles in the ahead of print (AoP) mode, taking care of the ever-increasing submission rate.

It was thought that the journal needed a dynamic executive editor with a keen eye for detail. Someone who could bring his/her expertise in the peer review process and content quality evaluation to place IJRSMS at a level where it could compete for major bibliographic portals. At this time, I was able to meet and recruit Dr. Vineet Kapoor, another young and enthusiastic personality. I met him first on personal grounds, but in my very first meeting, I could gauge that he had the potential to take the journal to the next level. In no time, Vineet was on board, and we started working together to further solidify the journal’s peer review process and subsequent selection of articles. The journal had entered its tenth volume, and now it was time to aim for a higher indexing status.

We then decided to go ahead with our application at the prestigious Experta Medica (EMBASE) portal. We were confident of our strong original content addressing diversified topics like “Tibial Malrotation”,^[1] “Keloid treatment”,^[2] Hematological Malignancies,^[3] Post Cardiac Surgery Arrhythmias,^[4] and Femur Fractures^[5] giving us a strong chance of success.

The hour of recognition finally came! We all are extremely delighted to share with our readers that IJRSMS is now not only indexed in EMBASE but the concerned authorities have extended its selection to the new platform, Experta Medica (EMBASE) (a new and separate nursing collection). This selection means that the journal is now a top-tier journal recognized by the National Medical Commission (NMC). This selection means the world to us. Personally, this success reflects the stupendous journey I have had with the journal editors, experiencing the highs and lows. Despite difficult times during which we thought that we might close the journal, we persevered, and today, we all are proud that our collective efforts have brought us, our authors and reviewers, the much desired and deserved recognition. From here on, we will be even more committed to serving the medical fraternity via our engaging and enriching publications, and we are confident that in the future, IJRSMS will be recognized by PubMed Central and Clarivate as well. Onwards and Upwards!

Dr. Sunny Duttagupta

Director Publishing

Scientific Scholar