Reflections – For today leads into tomorrow

“This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.” – Mark Twain As the curtains close on the year 2024, it is time to look behind to retrospect and look forward to plan in the best interests of the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology (IJO) as its parent society, the All India Ophthalmological Society (AIOS), treads forward to greet the world in the 40th Asia-Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology Congress in conjunction with the 83rd Annual Conference of AIOS in the forthcoming summer of April 2025. This year also saw the portals of the IJO contribute to the ophthalmology academics with its 12 regular monthly issues along with five supplement issues as well. The scope of the journal has expanded to include the new category of “Challenging Cases” introduced in 2024 along with mentored research articles to help and guide creditable manuscripts of young ophthalmologists reach the audience with best research writing denominations. The production team works relentlessly to get all the accepted manuscripts on to ahead of print, further enabling authors publishing with IJO see their work reach the target audience in time with free open access. IJO awards helps to encourage Indian contributing authors to compete for best published paper among the various categories of submission, and the new introduction of best published postgraduate thesis work seeks to reward the best research team catering to the research endeavors of residents in training. What is worrying is to see the 2023 IJO impact factor (IF), which was announced in June 2024, showing a value of 2.1, depicting a decline compared to the previous year (3.1). Retrospection to analyze this downward trend and measures to enhance its rise are imperative to steer our flagship journal into a wider readership and further enhance IJO’s stand as a sought-after journal to publish by authors worldwide. The IJO 2023 IF calculations center on the data derived by dividing the total number of citations in 2023 of the IJO articles published in 2021 (n = 1562) and 2022 (n = 938) by the number of published citable articles in 2021 (n = 549) and 2022 (n = 641). The list of published articles that received the top five citations in 2023 is given in Table 1.[1] IJO 2023 IF without self-citations is 1.8, with Table 2 detailing the number of citations received from various journals.1] It is clearly evident that the advantage of coronavirus disease-related publications has slipped away a long while ago and we need to awaken to the reality that our submissions need to cater to the requirement of current relevant hot topics. This vividly highlights the need to further raise bars and elevate standards of manuscripts accepted for publication in the journal.Table 1: Most cited IJO articles (top five) in 2023 among published in 2021/2022Table 2: Details of the citing sources in 2023 of the IJO articles published in 2021/2022It is obvious that for the IF to gain higher grounds, it is important to not just increase the number of manuscripts published in a journal, but also pay particular attention to the quality of the manuscripts that feature in it, to enhance the chances of citation by researchers world over. It is to be noted that while items such as editorials are not conventionally considered in the denominator of the IF calculation, their citations, however, are included in the IF calculations. While attempts to include articles that help to focus on increasing citations are already underway to boost IF, an increased realization on the part of submitting Indian authors to enhance the content and standards of their research writing will go a long way in further enhancing the journal’s standard and uplifting its IF. The number of full-length manuscripts has also been reduced in an attempt to help boost the future IF. IJO is accompanied by its sister journal Indian Journal of Ophthalmology Case Reports (IJOCR), which receives popular readership, especially from residents in training, given its immense academic clinical content in the form of case reports, case series, ophthalmic images, photo essays, and the new section featuring video reports as well. I wish to call upon everybody to relish the academic content of IJOCR as it walks the readers through a rich realm of clinical ophthalmology pertaining to all ophthalmic subspecialties. Closing with the quote from the American writer Hal Borland, “year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instil in us.” We move on into the new year, making ourselves wiser by looking behind at what we have learnt from the IJO statistics of the past years and looking forward to strategically apply our experience to the future ahead, hoping for the realms of IJO to unfold wider and higher in 2025.