Editorial

Author

Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran

Editor inChief___________________________

We are proud to announce the launching of the first international journal related to bone and joints and rheumatic diseases affiliated to Iranian Rheumatology Association(IRA).

It's my great pleasure co-founding the first Iranian rheumatology journal after almost 30 years of rheumatology fellowship programs in Iran [1]. This journal provides a forum for both academics and practitioners in the field to publish their works and more importantly novelideas.

The purpose of this first editorial is to introduce journal of "Rheumatology Research" (RR) to all rheumatologists and orthopedic surgeons who love research and like thinking "out of the box" and to discover new horizons in thefield.

We also honored having some distinguished international rheumatologists including; Professor Oliver Distler, Professor of Inflammatory Rheumatology, Division of Rheumatology, University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, (http://www.med.uzh.ch/ UeberdieFakultaet/fakultaetsmitglieder/distleroliver.html), Doctor Andrew Östör, Director of the Rheumatology Clinical Research Unit at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, United Kingdom, (http://www.immunology.cam.ac.uk/directory/ajko2@cam.ac.uk) and Professor Johannes J Rasker MD PhD, Rheumatologist, Emeritus Professor, University of Twente http://www.utwente.nl/bms/pgt/en/emp/rasker/ with us along with brilliant Iranian pioneers in the field.

RR will publish not only original works, but also case studies, clinical images and novel ideas. We invite pioneers to provide us with their great opinions and ideas to be a base for novel works by acting researchers.

The main purpose of launching RR is to incorporate the fields of general rheumatology with sub-specialties of vascular rheumatology, clinical immunology, myology, osteology, orthopedics, rehabilitation, rheumatology and nursing. We also welcome scientists who work related to other aspects of human locomotion system and connective tissue diseases. We would like to make all of our readers, feel free to announce their ideas.

I think one of the major threats of medical universities is to "follow" classic medicine instead of "creating" innovative one. Two major missions of universities are education and research I think. Unfortunately these two goals are overshadowed by busy practice and in some exceptional instances academic misconduct and economic pressure even in some European countries [2-5]. One of the major deficits of universities in developing countries is lack of idea of training students, residents and fellows in order to boost their abilities to discover the hidden facts behinds diseases or conditions and to challenge others' ideas. In contrary, most of academics in developing countries trained to think "within the box", in other words relying only on traditional/ modern text books. Most of graduates used to approach as and adhere to ideas of "prestigious names" rather than training and learning "academic behavior" to make good academichabits.

We should remember the "golden triad" of evidence based practice which emphasizes on incorporation of the best evidence, physician expertise and patients' preference as the pillar of standard practice. In developing countries again, clinicians usually ignore the critical role in creating and developing the clinical and basic evidence per se. So, quality studies are sometimes replaced with voluminous low quality duplicate works and "big bad data" with biased results6. More importantly we have to emphasize thinking about the validity of old and even current concepts in clinical issues and preventing blind teaching in training programs [7].

We should also revisit most popular values; many valuable and novel ideas has been never globally published or get published with low chance of frequent citations [8]. On the other hand we see some authors who select and follow hot topics for better marketing and citation while the philosophy and main aim of research is to solve an important problem and to fill the knowledge gap not to boost theresume!

RR team is going to promote quality researches via organizing and publishing novel ideas and high quality papers after careful peer review and editorial process.

Davatchi F. Rheumatology in Iran. International journal of rheumatic diseases 2009;12:283-7.
Owlia MB, Mirzaei M. Conducting research in developing countries: a challenging issue. Journal of Case Reports in Practice (JCRP) 2014;2:98-9.
Roberts DL, St John FA. Estimating the prevalence of researcher misconduct: a study of UK academics within biological sciences. PeerJ 2014;2:e562.
Beisiegel U. [Motivation of young academics for medical research. Position of the German Council of Science and Humanities]. Bundesgesundheitsblatt, Gesundheitsforschung, Gesundheitsschutz 2009;52:850-5.
van Wesel M. Evaluation by Citation: Trends in Publication Behavior, Evaluation Criteria, and the Strive for High Impact Publications. Science and engineering ethics 2015.
Hoffman S, Podgurski A. Big Bad Data: Law, Public Health, and Biomedical Databases. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 2013;41:56-60.
Owlia M, Mirzaei M. Acute rheumatic fever: over- estimation or mis-conception? International journal of cardiology 2013;168:5107-8.
Meenen NM. [The impact factor--a reliable sciento-metric parameter?]. Unfallchirurgie 1997;23:128-34; discussion 35-6.