Following a rigorous review process, Radiography journal has been accepted into the MEDLINE database.
The Society and College’s director of professional policy, Charlotte Beardmore, hailed the listing as a key development in Radiography’s evolution as the world’s foremost peer-review journal for the profession.
“Achieving the listing with MEDLINE has been a very important goal,” Charlotte said.
“Congratulations to the journal’s editor-in-chief, Julie Nightingale, as well as the publishers, Elsevier, and the executive publisher, Cathi O’Hara. They and the journal’s editorial board have done so much to make this possible.”
Julie Nightingale explained the significance of a listing with the MEDLINE database, “For the radiography profession to develop and evolve in its own right, research has been a crucial component in establishing our evidence base.
“One of the primary ways of disseminating this research has been via articles published within scholarly journals. The Radiographyjournal is a well-established professional publication.
“Having Radiography listed is recognition by the National Library of Medicine that radiography is a profession distinct from radiology and oncology and it has a developing evidence base that is of interest to MEDLINE readers and researchers.”
Julie continued, “Previously any search through PubMed or MEDLINE would not have found any of the articles published in Radiography. This listing means that articles will be visible to a much wider multi-professional audience from around the world.
“Not only does this mean that our research will be able to have greater impact on knowledge and practice, but also that our articles may attract a greater number of citations from other journals. These citations are important because they are collated and used as a proxy measure of impact when comparing journals.”
The news of the listing follows the earlier announcements that Radiography had been adopted as the official journal of both the European Federation of Radiographer Societies and the Irish Institute of Radiography and Radiation Therapy. The current version has been the peer-review journal of the College of Radiographers since 1995.
SCoR members receive printed copies of Radiographyand can browse issues online.
What is MEDLINE?
MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine (NLM) journal citation database. Started in the 1960s, it provides access to more than 23 million biomedical and life sciences journal articles. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). This means that the researcher or practitioner who is searching the literature can do so with greater reliability using MeSH keywords.
The majority of journals are selected for MEDLINE based on the recommendation of the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee, a National Institute for Health body of external experts similar to the committees that review large grant applications.
The committee reviews and recommends journals based upon the quality of the scientific content, including originality and the importance of the content for the MEDLINE global audience.
A journal listed in MEDLINE has therefore received a stamp of approval in terms of both quality of content and usefulness to the audience. This potentially improves the quality of literature searches through MEDLINE because poor quality journals are not invited to join.