The Slippery Slope of Editing : Balanced Perspectives for Initiating a New Biomedical Journal

Abstract

Since the evolutionary advent of scientific thinking, medical journals have been well-known and influential media for professional and scientific discourse within academia. Such journals have been an integral part of medical literature, comprising content relating to historical and contemporary views about diagnosis, prognosis, and medical conditions management. Starting from the Edwin Smith Papyrus (first known medical treatise) of Egypt to Yellow Emperor, China, Iliad and Odyssey, Greece to our own Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas: medical discourse has been presented in various forms which have led to the contemporary evolution of medical journals.[1] Contrary to the plethora of unauthenticated medical information and health-related news available in the modern world, published content in scientific journals has to pass through a rigorous and preferably blinded peer review process. This essentially keeps in check the content-validity and scientific relevance of published material through reviews by equally or more qualified experts in the same fields as the author, promoting revisions and suggestions to improve the manuscripts’ quality. Initiating a new medical journal (especially in the growing field of mental health) is always a challenge laden with the thin line of balance between ensuring scientific rigor and exciting content and being ‘lost’ in an endless pool of rapidly-emerging biomedical publications.