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Editorial

Indexation at Last:The End of the Beginning

Franklin RosenfeldtFounding Editor

On 15th November at the editorial office we receiveda letter from the National Library of Medicine in

Bethesda, Maryland notifying us that Heart Lung andCirculation (HLC) had been selected to be indexed andincluded on Medline. This was greeted with great jubi-lation. We proceeded to notify the publishers and all

has been set up from Elsevier’s “electronic warehouse”.The abstracts for “Articles in Press” are loaded as soon asapproval is given, and later replaced with the full articlein final published form. It is worth knowing that inde-pendently of indexation, Elsevier had already placed onits ScienceDirect database, electronic copies of all issues

editorial members of the good news. Later on all mem-bers of the Australasian Society of Cardiac and Tho-racic Surgeons and The Cardiac Society of Australia andNew Zealand were notified. Now we share the goodnews with all readers. The editors and publishing staffmet in Melbourne on December 14th to plan the futureof the Journal in the post-indexation era. This meet-ing was followed by a celebratory dinner hosted by thepublishers.

The achievement of indexation marks the end of onelong road and the beginning of another. It marks the endof HLC being considered a second string journal, mainlybecause it was not indexed but also because it was lookeddown upon as a regional journal based “down under” inAustralasia. There may also have been on the part of someof our colleagues an element of the Australian “cultural

of the journal beginning with Volume 1 in 1991 as theAustralasian Journal of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery. If yourlibrary subscribes to ScienceDirect, amazingly a few mouseclicks will give you access to any article ever published inthe Journal from Volume 1 (1991) to the current Volume14 (2005). A total of 16,809 full text electronic downloadsof HLC articles via ScienceDirect by readers around theworld have been made in the 12 month period to October2005. Up to 1800 full text electronic downloads have beenmade in a single month. The average number of down-loads is increasing every month. With listing on PubMed,electronic downloads will increase exponentially. So pub-lishing in HLC already gets your message out to theworld and will do much more powerfully in the future. Toenhance communication with the Cardiac Society of Aus-tralia and New Zealand (CSANZ) it is planned to estab-

cringe” whereby no publication emanating from Australiawould be considered truly international and hence notsomewhere where one would want to publish one’s betterwork! This attitude must change and will change. Index-ation is the first step towards international recognition.

lish an editorial office in Sydney located in the CSANZsecretariat.

In 2006 HLC will appear bimonthly; there will be sixregular issues and at least two supplements. This willspeed up the publication process and shorten the time

onsrig

lag between acceptance and publication, currently aroundfour months. We will enhance our focus on our desig-nated cardiovascular specialty interests namely Indige-nous Health, Tissue Engineering and Ageing.

Ultimately a journal is no better than its authors, its ref-erees, its editors and its publisher. The editors now inviteyou, the readers and particularly members of the CardiacSociety of Australia and New Zealand and the AustralasianSociety of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgeons to get behindour journal and contribute to the exciting new era for Aus-tralasia’s international cardiovascular journal Heart Lungand Circulation.

and the Cardiac Society ofhts reserved.

1443-9506/04/$30.00doi:10.1016/j.hlc.2006.01.002

The next is a progressive increase in the scientific and aca-demic status of the journal. This will involve increasing thejournal’s impact factor. Already the editors have begun toraise the bar for acceptance of manuscripts for HLC. Cur-rently only 19% of articles are accepted unchanged, 37%after minor revision, 22% after major revision and 22% arerejected. With the increasing number of submissions therejection rate is expected to approach 50% in the not toodistant future.

As a result of indexation, HLC is now available onPubMed going back to 2000 when the name changed toHLC from the Asia Pacific Heart Journal. An electronic feed

© 2005 Australasian Society of Cardiac and Thoracic SurgeAustralia and New Zealand. Published by Elsevier Inc. All

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2 Editorial Heart Lung and Circulation2006;15:1–2