«FARMAKOEKONOMIKA. Modern Pharmacoeconomics and Pharmacoepidemiology» is the first scientific and practical journal intended for publication of Russian pharmacoeconomic studies data.

Founded by IRBIS Publishing House in 2008, in 2010 the Journal was already in the List of the Higher Attestation Commission. By indexing in the database of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI), the Journal has a fairly high impact factor excluding self-citation - 0.450. Based on the 5-year impact factor which is 0.539, Pharmacoeconomics. Modern pharmacoeconomics and pharmacoepidemiology is the leader both among four scientific journals on pharmacoeconomics indexed in RSCI (the other three do not have an impact factor yet) and among six scientific publications on epidemiology indexed in RSCI. The Journal is abstracted by the All-Russian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information of Russian Academy of Sciences (VINITI); information about the journal is published annually in international help system for periodical and serial publications “Ulrich's Periodicals Directory”; the Journal is indexed in Google Scholar - international database that provides the full-text search of the scientific publications of the most reviewed journals of major scientific publishers.

In 2014, the concept and the policy of the journal have slightly changed, which was dictated by the challenge of the time. It has become clear today that if five or six years ago, when we started to publish the journal, pharmacoeconomics was interesting mainly to narrow specialists in this sphere and health officials, now we feel a growing interest to this subject in all the professional community. Medical practitioners have become more focused on the economic aspects in addition to the traditional approach including treatment effectiveness and safety assessment, while the economic component of pharmacotherapy often remained beyond the scope.

That is why, in addition to the recognized experts in pharmacoeconomics and health technology assessment, we invited the leading scientists and experts in various therapeutic areas to the editorial staff. This will ensure prompt and high expertise of scientific studies both in terms of methodology of pharmacoeconomic analysis and clinical, practical aspects of diagnosis and management of patients.

The editorial staff intends to make every effort to involve not only the heads of medical institutions and decision-makers, but also - to a greater extent of healthcare practice - the doctors of different specialties and therapeutic areas as the readers of the publication. We strongly believe that during our uneasy economic times, each doctor should have a basic knowledge of pharmacoeconomics. After all, our main goal is to create conditions for more rational budget spending and increase the availability of high-performance health care.

In addition to that, in 2015, we plan to expand the subject of published articles, in particular by making greater focus on pharmacoepidemiology, health insurance and health economics in general.

We are confident that the articles on current opportunities and results of economic evaluations in health care will undoubtedly cause great scientific and practical interest.

We will definitely continue to publish materials on the results of pharmacoeconomic studies. We believe that the new methodological approaches used in solving pharmacoeconomic problems won’t be neglected.

We significantly increased the number and expanded the geography of the authors of scientific publications. So, the articles with the results of own researches by the specialists from the regions of Russia, Belarus and other neighboring countries and beyond were accepted for publication.

At the same time a lot of work will be aimed to further improvement of the process of selection of publications: we introduce a double-blind review of manuscripts, when the authors do not know the reviewers, and the reviewers do not know the authors of the publication they are to review. Such an approach which is increasingly adopted by the leading foreign scientific publishers will raise quality of the scientific publications to new heights that will ultimately make the journal even more interesting and useful to readers.