Milestones

Ancient Romans erected stone pillars or obelisks along roadsides. Set a mile apart, those “milestones” bore numerals and served as markers or reference points to guide travelers. This year, JAFES takes a moment to pause and acknowledge the milestones of its journey, as the Philippines hosts the 20th ASEAN Federation of Endocrine Societies (AFES) Congress in Manila. JAFES has been granted a full symposium at the Congress that is entirely dedicated to matters about publication, with topics on ensuring publication success, peer review, and use of social media for improving the dissemination of scientific outputs. It will be an opportunity to recognize our outstanding authors and reviewers, and also to launch an audiovisual presentation to celebrate our 10th year and renew our commitment to both authors and readers.

We are thankful that our purposeful investments, in incorporating international best practices of ethical and scholarly research, are paying off.

The JAFES improved year by year by bringing home and adapting new guidelines, resources, and tools through our attendance in local and international medical journal editors’ conferences. We learned much from online discussions on various ethical and operational publication issues through the World Association of Medical Editors. Our own varied and sometimes colorful encounters and experiences with authors, reviewers, and editors, also served to enrich and refine our editorial processes. These milestones are all documented as part of knowledge management, to ensure continuity for the next generation of JAFES editors, peer reviewers, editorial staff members, and authors.

The journey of JAFES is a collective and continual effort that starts with the regular annual support of AFES societies for journal operations and arrives at semi-annual issues bringing readers scholarly contents that have been produced by endocrinologist researchers from the region. We are doing this one step, one innovation, one enhancement, one mile at a time (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The journey of JAFES 2010-2019.

Among three indexing services that we set out to achieve nine years ago, we reached inclusion in Scopus® under Elsevier in 2016, and more recently in 2019, acceptance to the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) under Clarivate Analytics™ (formerly Thomson Reuters). Launched in 2017 to cover high-quality, peer-reviewed publications of regional importance and in emerging scientific fields, ESCI effectively places JAFES in the Web of Science Core Collection, further improving the searchability of published articles. Indexing is a testament to the quality of JAFES, a validation of all the international best practices that we have incorporated along the way. Moreover, through measurable citation performance, Scopus and ESCI shall provide us with important insights as to how JAFES content is being used and incorporated into global knowledge.

Where we are, where we have been, and where we are heading, is a fitting reminder of our commitment to ethical publication, for the benefit of endocrinologists in the region, medical practitioners, researchers, readers, and ultimately, our patients.