IFMBE Proceedings Series

In 2001 the Federation started a new IFMBE Proceedings Series with the aim to improve the visibility and accessibility of the papers presented at the IFMBE sponsored conferences. The first volume in this series was the Proceedings of the IX Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing MEDICON 2001, Pula, June 2001, and the second is the Proceedings of the 12th Nordic Baltic Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, Reykjavik, June 2002. Very soon, at the 2nd European Medical and Biological Engineering Conference, the third volume will be available to the MBE community.

The importance of establishing this series is in the fact that the IFMBE Proceedings get a unique number, the ISSN that makes the series easily recognisable for the libraries and the scientific databases. The ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is an eight-digit number that identifies periodical publications as such. More than one million ISSN numbers have so far been assigned. It is managed by a worldwide network of 74 National Centres co-ordinated by an International Centre based in Paris, backed by UNESCO. Various partners throughout the information chain use the ISSN: libraries, subscription agents, researchers, information scientists, and newsagents. The ISSN of the IFMBE Proceedings series is ISSN 1680-0737.

The Publication and Publicity Committee of the IFMBE, chaired by Prof. J. Nagel, is preparing a detailed 'Guidelines for the organisers' of the IFMBE sponsors conferences in order to help them in their efforts to make the conferences successful and recognisable to the BME scientists.

The conference organisers have to send a complimentary copy of the Proceedings to relevant bibliographic information services, like INSPEC or Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). Both services make a selection of full papers that are entered to the databases. It is important to note that both mentioned databases make the Abstracts available for the users of the service.

INSPEC is the leading English-language bibliographic information service providing access to the world's scientific and technical literature in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, computers and computing, and information technology.

ISI is a database publisher of scientific, medical, and technical information. Product offerings include Current Contents, Science Citation Index, Journal Citation Reports and also the ISI Proceedings. The ISI^® Proceedings are multidisciplinary products that provide Web access to bibliographic information and authors abstracts from papers delivered at prestigious international conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions.

On behalf of the organisers of MEDICON 2001, I am very glad to inform you that the majority of the contributions published in the first volume of the IFMBE Proceedings were included in INSPEC and ISI Proceedings.

Ratko Magjarevic