Delay in indexing articles published in major pharmacy practice journals

Abstract

An analysis of three major pharmacy practice journals showed that the median time to indexing articles published in 2010 and 2011 was 114 days. While all articles from AJHP and Pharmacotherapy were indexed, 40 articles from Annals of Pharmacotherapy remained unindexed.

Quality of pharmacy-specific Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assignment in pharmacy journals indexed in MEDLINE

“…These findings contrast with what has been claimed by some authors when justifying the choice of only the journals Am J Health Syst Pharm, Ann Pharmacother and Pharmacotherapy to analyze MeSH assignment delay: they considered that these journals were representative of pharmacy practice literature. 30 These findings suggest that the categories used to group journals, such as the Subject Categories created for the Journal Citation Reports, should be analyzed on the basis of objective criteria such as the ones employed in this study.…”

“…In addition, articles selected had been included in PubMed for more than 6 months, allowing sufficient time for complete cataloging by the NLM staff. 30 During the journal selection process, a wide scattering of pharmacy articles containing the MeSH 'Pharmacists' across journals was noted: 667 articles in 194 journals in 2012. About 20% of these articles were published in journals with one single article indexed under the MeSH 'Pharmacists' in the year of 2012.…”

“…The 5-year timeframe was selected to avoid the impact of the delay in article indexation described elsewhere. 30 MeSH terms and Major MeSH terms, those representing the main topic of the article, were isolated from their subheadings and MeSH terms relating to specific pharmacy activities (pharmacy-specific terms) described in previous research 9 were identified. The pharmacy-specific MeSH 'Technology, Pharmaceutical' included in that study was excluded from the current analysis to improve specificity.…”

Comparison of the time-to-indexing in PubMed between biomedical journals according to impact factor, discipline, and focus

“…One study looked at the same 3 pharmacy journals, but a different publication range (January 1, 2010 -December 31, 2011) and reported a delay of 114 days (interquartile range, 98 -141 days). 16 A second study looked at articles published between 2008 -2012 across ten pharmacy journals and reported a delay of 134 ± 90 days. 17 The present analysis reports a longer delay of 163 ± 58 days.…”

“…health care professionals using PubMed to make evidence-based decisions [16][17]. There is limited information on factors that might contribute to this delay.…”