2024, a year for furthering the value of independent health policy research to minimize risks and ensure safety in medicine for better global health

Dear colleagues,

The International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine (IJRSM) wishes you a happy 2024 in peace and health! We start off the year with very exciting news. IJRSM received its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in June 2023 as the Journal Citation Reports now also publish JIFs for journals included in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) database of Web of Science. The JIF is a ratio which divides a journal’s received citations by a count of its published papers and demonstrates the citation impact of the journal’s recent content. IJSRM received a JIF of 1.7 for 2022, which is a great start [1].

The other important metric is CiteScore, which counts the citations received in the previous three years for articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters and data papers, and divides this by the number of publications in the same years. IJRSM received a 1.8 CiteScore for 2022 and is ranked in Q3 in the Health Policy, Medicine subject category of Scopus [2].

We are happy to report that we receive a steady level of submissions from all around the world, with the majority of submissions coming from Europe and Asia, followed by South and North America, Africa and Oceania. We also have a reasonably steady level of citations per year, which ranged between 330 and 406 citations for 2019–2022. Although this number declined slightly in 2022, looking forward to 2024, we are hopeful and optimistic about citation scores and impacts of 2023 and the years ahead.

Since its launch, IJRSM has received 4781 citations, with “Regional administrative health registries as a resource in clinical epidemiology” by Henrik Toft Sørensen and co-authors being the most cited paper [3]. With each year we receive an increasing number of article views. The number of views for 2023 nearly doubled compared to 2022, reaching a little over 29 thousand. The most viewed article in 2023 was a position paper entitled “The coverage of medical injuries in company trial informed consent forms” by David Healy and co-authors [4]. We thank our authors and contributors to IJRSM for their hard work and support. It makes all the difference!

For 2024, one of the major challenges will be to further increase the value of independent research of our contributors from all over the globe and to foster the impact of our research results for better quality, more equitable and safer health practices with new and established health technologies on one side and better health research practices on the other side.

This first issue of 2024 welcomes exciting research papers, a position paper and a case report from universities, academia and health institutions in Cuba, Indonesia, Iran, Portugal, Russia, and the USA. The papers are united by their focus on risk assessment and management, enhancement of quality of care, assessment and use of new technologies, pharmacogenetics, and medication reconciliation. We congratulate the authors for their valuable contributions to this issue.

The research paper on associations of antidepressants consumption with poor health outcomes and deterioration of quality of life among community-dwelling adults by Vittengl et al. shows that the use of antidepressants is a risk factor for mental health deterioration. The authors call for extra caution in the use of antidepressants and advocate for more consideration of non-pharmacological treatments for this population.

The case report by Ascenção et al. on medication reconciliation failure in Portugal follows the above-mentioned idea of prudent use of medicines and emphasizes the need for extra caution in the use of anticoagulants. Two research papers from Russia suggest the opportunity of using technologies for pharmacogenetics for ensuring safer use of anti-tuberculosis (study by Kantemirova et al.) and anti-hypertensive medicines (study by Sychev et al.).

The study by Panggabean et al. from IPB University, Indonesia, suggests implementing more research into consumer perceptions on the use and purchase of prescription medicines through e-pharmacy to add perceived risk as a latent variable in the study of consumer behavior for any high-risk products.

The study by Mohammadpour et al. from Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, Iran, suggests that the laboratory and operating room departments should focus more on adopting policies and solutions to improve the position of risk management, training and budget allocation for risk management.

The position paper by Rodríguez-Ramos et al. from Cuba presents the official set of performance measurements of attention in ST segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction of the Cuban Society of Cardiology and Cuban National Group of Cardiology.

This first issue brought together contributions from diverse authorship, the values of independent research, lessons for improved medicine and health policies, all targeted at minimising risks and ensuring safety in medicine for better global health.

On behalf of the entire editorial board and editorial office, we wish all our readers, authors, contributors and distinguished reviewers the very best for 2024 and hope that you’ll enjoy reading this issue. We look forward to your valuable contributions in 2024 and beyond!

Liliya Eugenevna Ziganshina

Editor-in-Chief