About Pajouhan Scientific Journal

Pajouhan Scientific Journal — Journal Profile

The Pajouhan Scientific Journal, abbreviated in ISO form as Pajouhan Sci J and often shortened to PSJ, is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal published by Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in Hamadan, Iran. On its own website the journal describes itself as the official journal of that university, published in Persian with English abstracts and references, and built around a main scope in the health of children and adolescents. It is an open-access title: every article is free to read immediately on publication, in both PDF and HTML, and the university states that it carries the publishing costs itself, so authors are not charged an article processing charge or any other publication fee. For researchers in child and adolescent health who work in Persian, for Iranian medical students and residents producing their first supervised research, and for international readers who want a window into Iranian paediatric and adolescent-health research through its English abstracts, this is a small, clearly identified university journal whose bibliographic record can be checked line by line. This profile sets out that record in full: the journal's identity and history, its publisher and supporting bodies, its scope and article types, its editorial and ethics arrangements, the citation figures that could be verified at checking time, its dissemination routes, its free-to-publish model, a practical account of how submission works, the neighbouring journals a reader may also want to compare, and answers to the questions authors most often ask before they send a manuscript to Hamadan.

Quick Facts

Identity and Bibliographic Record

A journal profile is only useful if its identity is anchored to identifiers that a librarian, an indexer or a suspicious reader can test independently, and the Pajouhan Scientific Journal passes that test cleanly. Its electronic ISSN is 2423-6276 and its print ISSN is 1029-7863; the pairing is stated in the journal's own masthead information, is repeated on the record held by Journals World for this post, and is the pairing under which citation databases group the title. The abbreviated title, Pajouhan Sci J, is the form that should be used in reference lists, because citation matching in databases depends in part on a consistent abbreviated form. The journal assigns DOIs to its content — its own site names DOI as its document identifier type — so an individual article can be cited, linked and counted even when a reader meets it outside the journal's own pages, for example inside an Iranian indexing service or a reference manager. Readers should note one point of care: the word Pajouhan is a transliteration, and older material may show variant spellings in romanised catalogues. The ISSN pair, not the spelling, is the reliable key. If a catalogue entry carries 2423-6276 or 1029-7863, it is this journal; if it carries neither, it is a different publication, whatever its title appears to say. That simple check protects authors from two common errors — citing the journal under the wrong title in a curriculum vitae, and submitting a manuscript to an unrelated title with a similar-sounding name. The journal's country of publication is Iran, its material is organised by volume and issue in the conventional way, and its own record gives its status as active.

History and Institutional Setting

The journal's own record gives its start year as 2012. It did not appear as a commercial venture. It is a university journal in the fullest sense: it is the official journal of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, it is produced through the university's press operation, UMSHA Press, and it works in scientific collaboration with the university's Student Research Committee. That last detail explains much about the journal's character. A student research committee exists to draw medical students and junior researchers into supervised research — framing a question, collecting data honestly, writing it up in a recognised format and surviving peer review. A journal attached to such a committee naturally becomes a training ground as well as an archive: it publishes work by established clinical researchers alongside carefully supervised work from younger authors, and its article mix reflects the concerns of a regional medical university — the health of children and adolescents in its own community first, and the wider questions of Iranian health care behind that. The journal also carries formal standing inside Iran's regulated system for medical periodicals. Its site records a publishing approval issued through the press and publicity affairs office of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, certificate number 92/33617, describing it as a Ministry of Health and Medical Education journal, and it records scientific-research approval from the Iranian committee of medical science journals of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education. Those approvals matter to Iranian authors in particular, because academic promotion and degree requirements in Iran commonly depend on publishing in journals that hold recognised national approval. International readers should read the same facts as a stability signal: this is an institutionally anchored title with a named university behind it, a documented approval history and a continuous quarterly rhythm, not a transient website using a journal-like name.

Publisher: Hamadan University of Medical Sciences

The publisher of record is Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, in the city of Hamadan in western Iran. The university publishes the journal through UMSHA Press, and the journal's site is hosted on the university's own domain, umsha.ac.ir — a detail worth checking for any journal, because a genuine university title normally lives on, or is clearly linked from, its university's web estate. The publisher relationship also explains the journal's economics, which are described in the fees section below: a university that publishes a journal as part of its academic mission can absorb editorial and production costs centrally, and Hamadan states explicitly that it has done so, which is why authors face no processing charge. It also explains the journal's open-access posture. The journal states that it follows the open-access policy associated with PubMed Central at the United States National Library of Medicine in the sense that all content is available immediately upon publication without an embargo period; readers should understand that sentence as a statement about immediacy of access on the journal's own site, and should check any individual article's presence in a given archive directly rather than assuming deposit. Day to day, the practical consequence for readers is simple: the full text of articles is presented in PDF and HTML on the journal site, free of charge and without a subscription, and the journal states that it has not accepted or published advertisements on its website or in its articles.

Scope: Child and Adolescent Health, in Persian, for a Clinical Readership

The journal defines its main scope as all fields of child and adolescent health. That is a deliberately practical scope, written for the clinicians, nurses, midwives, public-health workers and researchers who look after young people, rather than for a single laboratory discipline. Within that scope, the kinds of questions the journal's pages characteristically address include the physical health of infants, children and adolescents; growth, nutrition and development; infectious and non-communicable conditions as they present in young patients; adolescent health behaviour and risk; mental and psychosocial aspects of child and adolescent wellbeing; the organisation and quality of health services for children; health education for families and schools; and epidemiological studies of conditions affecting young people in Iran and comparable settings. Authors should read the scope as a fit test at two levels. At the first level, the population matters most: a study whose subjects, patients or policy concern are children or adolescents sits naturally here, while a general adult-medicine study with no paediatric angle will struggle to persuade the editors that it belongs. At the second level, the journal's language and audience matter: the full text is Persian, so the primary readership is the Persian-speaking clinical and academic community, even though English abstracts carry the findings outward. A manuscript that speaks directly to practice, services or populations in that community — a prevalence study from a regional clinic, an evaluation of a school health programme, a careful case report with a teaching point for primary care — is the kind of work the scope sentence was written to attract. Systematic reviews and policy briefs widen the door a little further: a well-conducted synthesis of evidence on a child-health question, or a short, argued brief on a service or policy problem in adolescent health, can fit even when the underlying data come from beyond a single institution, provided the conclusions are honestly framed and useful to the journal's readers.

Article Types and What Each One Requires

The journal publishes full-length, peer-reviewed papers in six named forms. Original research is the core: observational, experimental and survey-based studies with a clear question, a defensible method, ethics information where human participants are involved, and results reported without exaggeration. Review articles survey a defined topic for a clinical readership and should organise the literature rather than merely list it. Systematic reviews are named separately, which signals that the editors expect the apparatus of the genre — a stated search approach, explicit inclusion reasoning and a synthesis that separates evidence from opinion. Policy briefs are shorter, argued pieces aimed at decisions: they should state the problem, the evidence and the recommended course of action in plain terms. Case reports present individual or small-series clinical material; their value lies in the lesson — an unusual presentation, a diagnostic trap, a management point that generalises — and authors should make that lesson explicit rather than leaving readers to excavate it. Letters to the editor provide the journal's conversation space, for commentary on published work and for short observations that do not need a full article's frame. Across all six types, the journal requires an English presence even though the full text is Persian: an English abstract of about 250 words accompanies the article, and the journal's record also provides for an English extended abstract of 1,000 to 1,500 words. Authors who do not usually write in English should budget time for that element, because for most international readers the extended abstract is the article — it is what will be read, quoted and cited outside Iran.

Editorial Process, Peer Review and Ethics

The journal describes its content as peer-reviewed, and its publishing-ethics position is anchored to a recognised external standard: it states that it follows the code of conduct and best-practice guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE. It screens submissions with iThenticate plagiarism-detection software, which authors should take as a practical instruction as much as an ethics statement — overlapping text, recycled passages from an author's own earlier papers, and loosely paraphrased source material are all liable to be flagged before review, so the time to deal with them is before submission, not in correspondence afterwards. The COPE anchor also tells authors how the difficult cases are meant to be handled: suspected duplicate submission, undisclosed conflicts of interest, authorship disputes and ethical problems in the underlying research are the categories COPE guidance addresses, and a journal that publicly commits to that guidance is committing to a documented way of resolving them. What the journal does not publish prominently — and what this profile therefore does not invent — are guaranteed review timelines and an acceptance rate. Both figures are recorded here as could not be verified from the journal's own public pages at checking time, and authors who need a decision by a fixed date for a thesis or promotion deadline should write to the editorial office and ask, rather than relying on any third-party estimate. The honest general advice is the advice that applies to any quarterly university journal: submission-to-publication time depends on reviewer availability and on how much revision a paper needs, a quarterly rhythm means accepted papers wait for an issue slot, and a clean, complete, correctly formatted first submission is the single largest factor an author controls.

Metrics and Citation Standing — Verified Figures, Attributed

Citation figures for a small regional journal vary sharply by database, because each database counts a different set of citing sources, so this profile reports each figure with its source attached and warns readers not to mix sources in a single comparison. In OpenAlex, checked at the time of writing through the source resolved from the journal's electronic ISSN, the Pajouhan Scientific Journal (OpenAlex source S4210201544) carried 344 works and 516 citations, with summary statistics of an h-index of 9, an i10-index of 5 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.23. Those are OpenAlex's figures, computed from its own graph; they are useful for comparing this journal with other titles inside the same database and for confirming that the journal's articles are being cited, and they are not a Journal Impact Factor, which this profile does not claim for the title. The SCImago journal search, also checked directly, lists the Pajouhan Scientific Journal as an Iranian title published by Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, which independently corroborates the identity, country and publisher recorded here; a specific SJR value is not quoted in this profile because it was not displayed in the search response received at checking time, and quoting a number from an aggregator's older snapshot would risk presenting a stale figure as current. The Journals World record from which this profile was built carried an h-index of 4, a figure that reflects a different source and an earlier snapshot; the difference between 4 and 9 is a difference of database and date, not a contradiction that needs resolving by picking the larger number. Authors assessing the journal for a promotion file should state the database and the date alongside any figure they quote, exactly as this profile does, and should remember what the figures mean in context: this is a Persian-language, regionally focused clinical journal, and its citation footprint is correspondingly concentrated in Iranian and regional child-health literature. Judged against the purposes it actually serves — national academic recognition, dissemination to Persian-speaking clinicians, and a supervised route into print for junior researchers — raw citation totals are only one part of its value.

Indexing, Dissemination and Access

The journal is open access in the strong, simple sense: content is available immediately upon publication, without an embargo, in PDF and HTML, free to any reader, and there is no subscription fee for the audience. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence, which permits readers to share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes with attribution, and which authors should note if they plan to reuse figures or text in later commercial contexts. The DOI system provides the persistent linking layer, so citations remain resolvable even if page addresses change. Iranian readers and librarians will also encounter the journal through national scholarly infrastructure — Iranian journal articles are routinely indexed in domestic services such as the Scientific Information Database — and individual articles can be checked there directly; this profile makes no claim about any specific international index listing that could not be verified from a primary response received at checking time, and authors for whom a particular index is a hard requirement should verify that listing, by ISSN, in the index's own master list before submitting. That caution is general good practice, not a reflection on this title: index lists change, titles are added and removed, and the only listing that counts for a promotion or funding claim is the one in force on the day the claim is made. What can be said without qualification is that the journal's own dissemination is complete and free — any reader, anywhere, can open its site and read its archive today, at no cost, which is more than can be said for many larger titles.

Fees and Publishing Model

The journal's fee position is stated on its own site in unusually clear terms, and it is one of the title's strongest practical attractions: as Hamadan University of Medical Sciences has supported all of the publishing costs of the journal, the article processing charge and any other publication fees in the journal are free for authors. There is no submission fee to budget for, no page charge, and no subscription cost on the reader side. Authors should still read that statement the way they would read any fee statement — as the position at checking time, on the journal's own page, which is the authoritative place to re-confirm it on the day of submission. A genuinely free, university-funded journal should also be distinguished from the predatory operations that advertise low or hidden charges: the markers here point the other way, since the journal names a real university publisher, a real approval history, a recognised ethics framework and a plagiarism-screening step, and it charges nothing at all. Researchers with no grant funding — a common position for the student and junior-clinician authors this journal serves — can therefore treat cost as a solved problem and concentrate entirely on whether the journal's scope, language and audience fit their manuscript.

How to Submit: A Practical Walk-Through

Submission runs through the journal's own website at psj.umsha.ac.ir, where authors create an account and follow the journal's submission route. Before uploading anything, work through the fit checks in order. First, test the population: does the manuscript concern children or adolescents, their health, their services or their families in a way a child-health reader would recognise as theirs? If the paediatric angle has to be argued into existence, another journal will serve the paper better. Second, choose the article type honestly — a small case series dressed as original research, or a narrative essay submitted as a systematic review, wastes everyone's time, including the author's. Third, prepare the language package the journal expects: the Persian full text, the English abstract of about 250 words, and, where required, the English extended abstract of 1,000 to 1,500 words, each written to stand alone, because the abstracts will travel further than the full text. Fourth, assemble the ethics and transparency material — ethics-committee information for human research, consent position for case material, conflict-of-interest and funding statements, and an author list that reflects actual contributions. Fifth, run the similarity check yourself in substance if not in software: the journal screens with iThenticate, so remove recycled wording, quote and cite any unavoidable overlap, and be especially careful with methods passages borrowed from your own earlier papers. Finally, after submission, keep the correspondence professional and patient: respond to reviewers point by point, mark changes clearly, and treat a revise decision from a journal of this kind as what it usually is — editors investing effort in a paper they intend, if they can, to publish. If a hard external deadline is approaching, contact the editorial office through the journal site and ask about timing openly rather than submitting the same work elsewhere in parallel, which the ethics framework the journal follows does not permit.

Who Should — and Should Not — Submit

The strongest candidates are Persian-writing researchers in child and adolescent health: clinicians in Hamadan and comparable regional centres reporting data from their own services; academic staff in Iranian medical universities whose promotion rules reward nationally approved journals; postgraduate and undergraduate medical researchers working under the wing of a student research committee, for whom the journal is an intended home; and authors of careful case reports, regional epidemiology and service evaluations whose natural audience practises in Persian. The journal can also suit authors of systematic reviews and policy briefs on child-health questions who want their synthesis read by the clinicians and managers who would act on it locally. It is a weaker fit for authors who need an English-language full text to reach an international research audience, for laboratory science with no child or adolescent population, for adult medicine, and for anyone whose institution will only credit a specific named international index — those authors should verify listings first, as advised above, and may conclude that a different title serves that particular requirement. None of that is a judgement on quality; it is the ordinary geography of scholarly publishing, in which a journal serves a defined community well precisely because it does not try to serve every community at once.

Similar and Neighbouring Journals

Authors comparing venues in this space usually weigh three kinds of neighbour. Within Iran, other university medical journals — including general medical titles published by other universities of medical sciences — offer a comparable national route, sometimes with a broader scope that can absorb work falling outside child and adolescent health. Within the specialty, dedicated paediatric journals at national and international level offer a more exclusively paediatric readership, in some cases in English, and authors should compare their scope statements, languages and index positions by ISSN before choosing. Within the wider Persian-language medical press, general and specialty titles indexed in Iranian services form the practical comparison set for authors whose primary goal is recognition inside the Iranian academic system. In every case the comparison should be made on verified facts — ISSN, publisher, language, fees and current index listings checked in primary sources — rather than on headline metrics copied from aggregator pages, and a shortlist of two or three titles, each checked the way this profile checks its own subject, will produce a better decision than any ranking table.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Pajouhan Scientific Journal a real, peer-reviewed journal? Yes. It is the official journal of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, it describes its papers as peer-reviewed, it holds Iranian publishing and scientific-research approvals recorded on its own site, and it follows the publication-ethics guidance of COPE.

What are its ISSNs? Electronic ISSN 2423-6276 and print ISSN 1029-7863. Use that pair, rather than the transliterated title alone, whenever you need to identify the journal unambiguously.

Does it charge authors? No. The journal states that, because Hamadan University of Medical Sciences supports all of its publishing costs, the article processing charge and any other publication fees are free for authors. Re-confirm on the journal site at submission time.

What language will my article appear in? The full text is Persian. The journal also carries an English abstract of about 250 words and provides for an English extended abstract of 1,000 to 1,500 words, which is how most international readers will meet your work.

What topics fit? The journal's stated main scope is all fields of child and adolescent health. Work on other populations, with no genuine paediatric or adolescent angle, is unlikely to fit.

What article types does it accept? Original research, review articles, systematic reviews, policy briefs, case reports and letters to the editor.

Is it open access? Yes. Content is available immediately on publication, without embargo, in PDF and HTML, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence, and there is no subscription fee.

What citation figures can I quote? Quote a database and a date together. In OpenAlex at checking time the journal's source carried 344 works, 516 citations and an h-index of 9. Do not present those figures as a Journal Impact Factor.

How long will review take? A guaranteed timeline could not be verified from the journal's public pages at checking time. Ask the editorial office directly if a deadline matters, and expect the rhythm of a quarterly journal.

Conclusion

The Pajouhan Scientific Journal is a clearly identified, university-published, open-access quarterly in child and adolescent health: Persian in full text, English in abstract, free to publish in and free to read, ethically anchored, and institutionally approved inside the Iranian medical-journal system. Its citation footprint, verified above with sources attached, is modest and regional, which is exactly what its mission predicts. For the authors it exists to serve — Persian-writing clinicians, Iranian academics and supervised junior researchers in child health — it offers something many larger journals cannot: a legitimate, cost-free, peer-reviewed home whose readers are the very practitioners its articles are written for.