Medical Journal Publishing in Nepal: Challenges and the Way Forward

Abstract

Nepal, one of the lower-and middle-income countries (LMIC), has stretched its network of medical institutions considerably since the 1990s, and with this growth has come a corresponding mushrooming of biomedical journals.Yet the quality of domestic scholarly publishing has not kept pace with the quantity of papers. Journals have multiplied without a parallel maturation of peer-review culture, editorial governance, or ethical supervision.This results in a paradox: a country with distinct public-health challenges- from high altitude physiology to drug-resistant tuberculosis to maternal mortality—still struggles to produce and publish research that adequately addresses those challenges.The viewpoint, written from the perspective of a scholar who has submitted to Nepalese journals, examines three meshing problems: the instrumentalization of indexing, misinterpretation of impact factor, and the fragility of the editorial system. Thus, a reform agenda grounded in international practice is proposed.