MCI guidelines on publications for academic Promotions.

ABSTRACT

We read with interest the editorial by Aggarwal et al. 1 regarding the revised guidelines of the Medical Council of India (MCI) for publications for academic promotions.2 We agree with the authors that the new guidelines raise several important issues. The primary among them is the restriction of acceptable publications to original research with raw data. We do feel that systematic reviews, meta-analyses (including Cochrane reviews), brief communications (often because the journal will accept an original article in only this format), and case reports in journals with high impact factor should also be acceptable. The various indexing databases suggested do not include Science Citation Index and Indmed that are definitely more acceptable than Index Copernicus, which contains some journals of poor merit. We suggest that authorship in a high impact factor journal should be given more credit than one in a low impact factor journal. Finally, the first, second and last author should be given credit, rather than only the first and second. Issues of lack of adequate credit for the senior author in collaborative projects and ‘gift authorship’ are concerns with both extremes.