Assessing of Iranian medical English journals based on journal selection criteria in Scopus

Journals which have been indexed in universal citation databases can introduce their countries' scientific productions to the world' scientific communications. In this study, it is aimed to evaluate Iranian Medical English Journals (IMEJ) based on Scopus' journal selection criteria. This is a descriptive quantitative study which deals with the last issues of 52 numbers of IMEJ which have not been indexed in Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed. Data is collected using a researcherdeveloped checklist whose validity was confirmed by faculty members. Microsoft Office Excel was used to analyze data. According to our findings, the studied journals were in compliance with Scopus' journal selection criteria in the cases regularity in publishing, providing informative abstracts for articles, limiting the amount of self-citation, providing XML format for articles, providing the online system for sending and receiving the articles, and providing author's guidelines. The low amount of structured abstracts, the low number of foreign authors and editors, and the low amount of Endnote output were the most important weakness in IMEJ. Suggested solutions were promoting the cooperation with foreign editors and authors, and providing structured abstracts, and EndNote outputs by journals and authors. © Library Philosophy and Practice, 2018