• Critical Care
• CLINICAL MEDICINE
• Clinical Competence
• Clinical Trial
• Clinical Laboratory Techniques

Clinical and social pharmacy practice journal editors met in June 2022 in Granada, Spain. The purpose was to discuss how journals and pharmacy practice researchers might contribute to strengthening the reporting of pharmacy practice as a discipline and ultimately increase the quality of reports and the impact factors of pharmacy practice journals.

The meeting resulted in 18 recommendations called The Granada Statements.1 These describe six topics for good practice pharmacy publications. All six topics are intended to give more impact to pharmacy-related publications inside the major bibliographic databases. The six topics are:

1. The appropriate use of terminology

2. Impactful abstracts

3. Sufficient good quality peer reviews

4. Journal scattering

5. More effective and wise use of journal and article performance metrics

6. Authors’ selection of the most appropriate pharmacy practice journal to submit their work

The Granada Statements are published simultaneously in 12 journals and we commend them to our readers.1

In this editorial we focus on some key statements concerning appropriate terminology and production of impactful abstracts. In a future editorial we will focus on how researchers’ can select the most appropriate pharmacy practice journal for their research submissions.

It is important for pharmacists to recognise that we need to be consistent with using the appropriate terminology when publishing hospital pharmacy and clinical pharmacy research.2 Indeed, as observed in the pharmaceutical literature these are areas with ongoing developments and changes to improve the consistency of terminology. Impact factors can have a huge effect in obtaining grants that can translate to an increased opportunity for pharmacists to advance their career path.

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are a controlled vocabulary for indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. While MeSH terms are generally well known, sadly they are currently less relevant for pharmacy.3 A change in the development and usage of MeSH could make a huge difference in the impact of clinical and social pharmacy journals and accessibility to a wider range of readers.

Looked at from another angle, the aim of the Granada meeting was to recognise problems related to the low impact factors of pharmacy journals and to seek to resolve them. Previous initiatives in medicine have been successful to improve impact factors.

We think the meeting in Granada was a successful one and we anticipate that a follow-up meeting will add more detail on how to use the ideal terminology.

The ability to produce an ‘impactful abstract’ is an asset for reaching target audiences. Again, here the MeSH terms are important and should not be confused with keywords. Indeed, as well described in The Granada Statements MeSH terms play a crucial role in the retrieval of a well written clinical and social pharmacy paper. This will increase the visibility and impact factor of journals.

The points discussed above are important for two reasons. First, because we need to understand the underlying problems that cause poor recognition of clinical and social pharmacy science. And second, adopting these solutions should boost publishing in pharmacy journals in a similar way to what we have already witnessed in medical journals.