Maiden Impact Factor to Journal of Laboratory Physicians: An Encouragement for Editors and Authors

The entire editorial team of Journal of Laboratory Physicians (JLP) is pleased to share our happiness after receiving the maiden impact factor of 1.1 for the years 2020 to 2021, announced by Clarivate on June 29, 2023. I am also happy that the JLP has been put in the third quartile in its first evaluation by the Clarivate, which is very good rank for a journal that is only 13 years old. This encourages me to devote more time on the articles submitted to the journal. The journey of the journal has been smooth in the beginning getting PubMed indexing from very first issue. However, we could not have impact factor for several years, which was also due to my other commitments in those years. Nevertheless, we never had dearth of good articles. The journal published some outstanding research articles and a few highly citable review articles in past years. Some of these review articles on hepatitis B virus (HBV), Quorum sensing, and Brucellosis have been cited more than 140 to 235 times.^[1–4] It is most satisfying that not only review articles but also several original studies carried in India and published in the JLP have been cited extensively, some of them more than 200 to 300 times, for example, work done by Kodiatte et al on mean platelet volume and diabetes^[5] and pancytopenia.^[6]

The journal continues to receive good-to-very good original articles and some review articles also. Through this editorial we invite senior authors to submit good review articles on timely and relevant topics from any part of the world, which may be significant globally or regionally. The journal will be happy to consider articles submitted from resource-limited countries more sympathetically. A recent systematic review meta-analysis on prevalence of HBV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) in β-thalassemia patients from Pakistan presented astonishingly very high (29.79%) prevalence of HCV, as compared with HBV (4.13%) infection.^[7]

During coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic also we had outstanding flow of articles on varied medical specialities. Most of these have attracted attention of readers. In March 2023 issue of JLP we have an excellent review article on prevalence of soil-transmitted helminthic infections in the pediatric population in India by Chopra et al.^[8] In this review article, authors have estimated the pooled prevalence of soil-transmitted helminthic infections in India in the pediatric age group (< 18 years) and assessed the associated risk factors. They found a prevalence of ascariasis ranging from 0.8 to 91% and prevalence of Trichuris trichiura ranging from 0.3 to 72%. As expected, the prevalence of hookworm was low ranging from 0.2 to 80%. Two most important risk factors were open defecation practices and washing hands without soap. The message was clear that intestinal parasitic infections have clear association with personal hygiene and safe drinking water. Another interesting study published in the same issue was on cystic echinococcosis,^[9] which shows that in India these two parameters are improved in last few decades leading to declining seroprevalence of water born zoonotic diseases like echinococcosis. A similar publication in the June 2023 issue also endorses the impact of reduction in the number of open-defecation cases^[10] and deworm the world.^[11] However, a case reported in the March 2023 issue indicates that most of the fruits of improved supply of safe drinking water and improved hygiene are being enjoyed by population of mainland of India and not by the north-eastern parts of the country. The heavy infection of fasciolopsiasis in a 4-year-old child indicates that open defecation and fecal oral transmission of various parasitic infections is still very high in these areas.^[12]

Our journal served the cause of dissemination of the recent scientific advances in the field of COVID-19 epidemic and published several good articles. The JLP was probably the first journal that analyzed various mutations in the receptor binding domain (RBD) region of spike protein and predicted that these mutations might pose challenge in the vaccine efficacy and neutralizing monoclonal antibodies.^[13] These predictions were found to be realistic in following months.

Our journal published COVID-19 related manuscripts on priority. This is evident from the fact that we received 107 manuscripts in past 3 years and 30 of these are published. This acceptance rate was highest in any subject category. Some significant original studies and reviews published in 2021 have been liked by the readers. These articles were written on important and timely issues of biomedical waste management during the COVID-19 epidemic,^[14] and pathological findings in the autopsies done on COVID-19 victims.^[15] Articles published in 2023 on COVID-19 include an original paper from Italy,^[16] which describes selective index of various molecular and serological tests being used on the human clinical samples for the diagnosis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and the specificity can be compromised of these tests if care is not taken during their development. Two other papers describe emergence of new opportunistic bacterial and fungal infection in the era of COVID-19 and how these infections complicated the outcome of these patients. The organisms reported in these papers included identification of microbial agents causing blood stream infections such as Pandoraea apista,^[17]Burkholderia cepacia, Elizabethkingia meningoseptica, Candida auris, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, Achromobacter xylosoxidans,^[18] and Chryseobacterium gleum.^[19] We also published articles on how hypocalcemia can affect the outcome in COVID-19 patients.^[20]