Over the past few years, the Portuguese Journal of Pulmonology (PJP) has gone through a long and demanding uphill struggle to establish a significant role in the respiratory publishing world and contribute to the discussion of the most relevant respiratory issues. Specifically, becoming indexed in PubMed indexation in 2003, adhering to the Elsevier platform in 2010 and achieving the impact factor attributed in 2011 were the most important steps forwards on this journey. To follow the same pathway consistently our main objective nowadays has necessarily to be focused on the impact factor since that is the hallmark of the journal; it has decisive implications on the number and the scientific relevance of the submitted manuscripts and it impacts on opinion of the international respiratory community; it will generate not only more readers and authors but also facilitate the recruitment of reviewers. Since the quantity and quality of the existing respiratory journals are very high, this is certainly no mean task.
As I am now taking over the position of editor-in-chief of the PJP, I would like to express my gratitude to the Sociedade Portuguesa de Pneumologia (SPP) Leadership and its Head, Professor Carlos Robalo Cordeiro for their kind invitation and for their trust in my capacity to lead this project. I would also like to express my gratitude to the previous editor-in-chief Professor João Carlos Winck for all his visionary and successful hard work over the last three years, with which I have had the privilege of collaborating as editor-associate. Also, I sincerely wish Professor João Carlos Winck all the very best in his new career and I really hope that we are able to successfully build on what he has achieved.
The candidature for PJP impact factor was certainly an object of long and profound reflexion and debate by its leadership. In fact, when a medical journal moves forward into the group of the impact factor journals, it enters into a very competitive arena with very strict rules. The number of citations becomes the primary aim of the journal's activity, at the same time not losing sight of the training and information role which always have to be at the forefront in a national medical society publication.1 However, we began this journey with some serious handicaps. We are, in fact, only a small society with few members from a small country which does not have much impact in the world, we do not have any research groups that have a permanent place at international meetings and in leading publications and we could not even attract researchers from the basic sciences to the respiratory field. Moreover we do not have a tradition of research and publication on a regular basis which has had a negative effect on the number of manuscripts submitted nationally and on the recruitment of reviewers; these activities are rarely valued within our society.
So, why did we choose to set out and then persist in this way? Has it been worthwhile? Well, by following this path, we are now really in the centre of the scientific publishing world, and we have to think about and systematize our research according to the established rules, remembering what really matters, which is the right methodology, how to make our manuscripts attractive to reviewers and editors, and how the manuscript submission, reviewing and publishing procedures work.2 It is essential that this process leads to the submission of manuscripts of increased scientific relevance and certainly to raising the number of articles published in other respiratory journals with higher impact factor, this will give a greater recognition of the relevance of Portuguese respiratory research. I think that the way that the PJP publication process has evolved and the scientific relevance of the papers published in recent numbers justify this uphill struggle.
Has it been worth it? Yes we believe it has.
