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MEDLINE indexing and trying to understand the ethical constraints inherent in publishing people's stories: two milestones in the medical humanities journey
  1. Deborah Kirklin
  1. Correspondence to Dr Deborah Kirklin, Division of Medical Education, UCL Medical School, 4th Floor, Holborn Union Building, 2–10 Highgate Hill, London N19 5LW, UK; d.kirklin{at}pcps.ucl.ac.uk

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For authors and readers of this journal, a significant recent development is that since July 2010 all of our articles have been indexed in MEDLINE. Indexing by this internationally respected medical search engine greatly increases the likelihood that fellow researchers and other would-be readers will become aware of a paper of interest. MEDLINE indexing also provides those considering submitting a manuscript with a widely recognised endorsement of the journal's academic standing, an endorsement that heads of departments and grant awarding bodies use to benchmark the quality of the research academics undertake. This in turn encourages an increase in high quality submissions. For all these reasons, this long overdue recognition is an important milestone in the journal's on-going quest to become the premier international journal in medical humanities.

A second change over the last 10 years relates to the types and origins of the original research papers we publish. In the journal's early days the focus, quite rightly, was on two main areas. The first was a philosophical examination of what exactly this thing called medical humanities might, could or should be. The second involved medical humanities educators sharing with each other their ideas, …

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Footnotes

  • Competing interests None.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.