PMA criticises HEC for downgrading index medical journals of Pakistan

By M. Waqar Bhatti
February 20, 2020

The Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) has expressed serious concern over the degradation of all the index medical journals of Pakistan, saying that the journal recognition system of the Higher Education Commission, Pakistan, has downgraded all the highest category biomedical journals of the country to the so-called CLAY Medallion and Category X.

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“This was done by applying a new Journal Recognising System launched by HEC and the results were displayed on the HEC website in January 2020, which is freely available to all viewers around the world,” said Dr Qaiser Sajjad, secretary general of the PMA while

addressing a news conference at the PMA House on Thursday.

Accompanied by Sarwar Jamil Siddiqui, Chairman Editorial Board, JPMA; Dr Fatema Jawad, Editor-in-Chief, JPMA; Dr Qazi Muhammad Wasiq, Treasurer PMA Centre, Dr Muhammad Sharif Hashmani, President PMA Karachi; and Dr Abdul Ghafoor Shoro, General Secretary, PMA Karachi; Sajjad said that if the HEC did not rectify its “mistake” of downgrading the index journals of Pakistan within one week, which was carried out through some faulty software, they would approach the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

With all the adversities being faced in the country, twelve academic journals from Pakistan, which include three medical journals, enjoy the impact factor.

The three medical journals have struggled to keep their standards at a universally recognised level. They are The Journal of Pakistan Medical Association (JPMA), published by the Pakistan Medical Association, Pakistan Journal of Medical Science, a private journal and Journal of College of Physicians and Surgeons (JCPSP) published in Karachi. All these journals have an impact factor and are indexed with the highest indexing agencies as SCOPUS, PubMed, EMBASE, SCIE, BIOSIS and WOS. They are recognised by WHO and WAME.

The editors of these journals, besides publishing their journals regularly, concentrate on improving the quality of the manuscripts they accept for publication and accelerate their efforts to improve the standard of the journals.

They follow an author-friendly policy, help and guide them to improve their manuscripts with the help of members of the editorial board and peer reviewers. The editors know their rights but they also remember their duties and responsibilities which include teaching and training through workshops.

This attitude of the editors of the leading medical journals has never been appreciated by the authorities at the HEC. On the subject of downgrading the three leading medical journals, it was said that this new system called HJRS developed by a company was being used on a trial basis. It is then rather surprising that this new software could downgrade all the top grade journals on one click of the computer key.

The other important aspect is that if the HEC was running the software on a trial basis, why did they publicise the results on their website, which is visible around the globe?

The press conference was told that this amounts to a derogatory act against all the involved publications. The JPMA along with the other two indexed journals will continue to enjoy good reputation universally, but it will be the unfortunate Pakistani authors who will suffer as they have to publish a number of articles in W category journals for promotion. They will have difficulty in finding a foreign journal and most of all the move will deprive them of at least Rs100,000 for each article if accepted.

“We demand that the HEC should immediately withdraw this software, so that all the index medical journals are again on Category W, and in future the stakeholders/editors of the journals should be consulted before making these kinds of erratic decisions,” Prof Sajjad added.

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