Looking back over a decade with the African Journal of Emergency Medicine

Abstract

Nine years ago, I wrote an editorial for the very first issue of the African Journal of Emergency Medicine (AfJEM) [1]. In this editorial I highlighted the need for Africans to take responsibility for emergency care in Africa. Since then, emergency care has seen substantial growth on the continent. The founding of the African federation for Emergency Medicine (AFEM) a year prior to the launch of the AfJEM, spurred the formation of a handful of societies in all four corners of the continent. This led to new specialist training programmes, a decade of intercontinental and international cooperation in academia and training, and more regional societies, conferences and symposia than you can shake a stick at. It was the right time for an African emergency care journal to be founded. And how we have grown since: in 2012 only 16,186 downloads were recorded for the year. But by 2018 it was 20 times higher at 327,894 downloads for the year (Fig. 1). We have been indexed in both PubMed Central and Emerging Sources Citation Index. Two special issues have been published (paediatrics in 2017 and injury in 2019) we are working on two more special issues: emergency care systems and research. The International Federation for Emergency Medicine is guest editing a research special issue which has brought together a large number of global health academics in collaboration with African academics to describe research methods for lowand middle-income countries. Our international advisory committee includes the chief editors of the Annals of Emergency Medicine, Emergency Medicine Journal, as well as the past chief editor of the European Journal of Emergency Medicine. Along with other eminent committee members, they have shaped our vision and progress. We include the chief editor of International Emergency Nursing journal as a founding associate editor on our editorial board. Professor Lee Wallis, my co-chief editor, who is not only the most published African author in emergency care, has also held the presidency for both the AFEM and IFEM. The rest of our board draws from local experts from all over Africa as well as abroad. Most of all, we have been the voice of African emergency care [2] – and I m not just saying this. Our current 5-year h-index is 8 for citations and 21 for views,1 which respectively ranks us 42nd and 43rd globally. But our own analysis conducted in 2018 showed that when only African citations and views were considered (in other words only regional