from the editor
It ’ s Getting Crowded in the Medical Literature , But for the Right Reasons ?
Kudos to a few souls brave enough to raise the issue of ego-driven research in a recent journal commentary by Jalali , et al . ( 2021 ) who asked themselves why the healthcare sector seems to be struggling with gaining a solid research footing during the pandemic .
As they explain , “ Despite the advances in health sciences , emerging infectious diseases have become more frequent in recent decades . Furthermore , emerging and reemerging pathogens have led to several global public health challenges . A question , and to an extent a concern , arises from this : Why our healthcare system is experiencing several challenges in encountering the coronavirus outbreak , despite the ever-growing advances in sciences , and the exponential rise in the number of published articles in the first quartile journals and even the ones among the top 1 percent ? Two responses could be potentially provided to the question : First , there seems to be a significant gap between our theoretical knowledge and practice . And second that many scholars and scientists publish papers only to have a longer list of publications , and therefore publishing is viewed as a personal objective , rather than for improving communities ’ public health .”
Translational research has become the backbone of healthcare , with the goal of “ accelerating the movement of scientific findings into practical healthcare provision through translational research , so that the improvements in the health of the nation can be realized ,” Jalali , et al . ( 2021 ) say , adding , “ Yet , has society really progressed with the application of knowledge at the same pace of the rise in the number of published scientific articles , the increase of society ’ s knowledge about diseases , prevention mechanisms , screening . and treatment approaches , and the improvement of general public health ?”
The altruistic approach to academic publishing , of course , involves raising public awareness and to promote critical thinking within scientific communities to combat diseases . No better example of this is the rush to create open-access repositories for the immense number of studies being conducted on SARS-CoV-2 , with the scientific community racing to engage extensively in scientific research projects ,
According to Jalali , et al . ( 2021 ), “ The number of COVID-19 related research articles published in the first-quartile journals has been rising exorbitantly . This demonstrates that there is a gap between increasing and promoting science and the rise in the number of published articles , and their effectiveness within societies … we only see articles that are widely published and actually increase the number of articles and do not help to solve the problem ; the report of the number of published articles speaks for itself , although our thinking is that as the number of articles increases , so does the public awareness and the health status of the people , but in practice , such a thing has a wide gap between the number of articles published and the awareness of the people and the community .”
Don ’ t miss our cover story in this month ’ s edition on how experts are addressing research gaps relating to COVID-19 , a rising tide that we hope will float all boats in the healthcare , epidemiology and public health segments . healthcarehygienemagazine
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Until next month , bust those bugs ! Kelly M . Pyrek Editor & Publisher kelly @ healthcarehygienemagazine . com
Jalali R , et al . Contradictions in the promotion of publishing academic and scientific journal articles , and the inability to cope with the new coronavirus ( COVID-19 ). Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control Vol . 10 , No . 10 . Jan . 12 , 2021 . https :// aricjournal . biomedcentral . com / articles / 10.1186 / s13756-021-00884-0