The annual journal “Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean” (PAM) has been favorably reviewed by a panel of experts evaluating submissions to the international interdisciplinary bibliographic database Scopus. This is a token of appreciation for the work of PAM’s editors to date, and great news for the authors, whose articles will now be even more widely accessible to readers from around the world.
PAM is a scientific journal of more than 30 years standing. For the first two decades, its chief editors were Prof. Michał Gawlikowski and Prof. Wiktor Andrzej Daszewski, and the managing editor of the first five issues was Rafał Koliński. Later, the position of chief editor was taken over by Iwona Zych, who was associated with the journal almost from its foundation, serving as language editor (from volume 2) and, starting with volume 10, as managing editor, overseeing both the presentation and quality of content published in the journal. It is to her efforts that PAM owes its current form: a fully peer-reviewed journal working with Polish and foreign reviewers, an international editorial committee and advisory board.
The PAM journal has been published since 1990. In keeping with the editorial policy, it contained excavation reports from numerous expeditions of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw. Over time, other publications on the multi-dimensional legacy of Polish Mediterranean archaeology also began to appear in it.
They remain a fundamental part of the journal, but since the introduction of the “Studies” section in 2011, papers related to other research are also included. PAM publishes articles on a wide range of topics, from the results of archaeological, geophysical, conservation and restoration work, to in-depth scientific studies in these fields. They cover the broader Middle East, including the Arabian Peninsula and the Caucasus, as well as northern and northeastern Africa.
As early as 2010, all volumes of PAM were made available online. Currently, there are almost 1,100 PAM articles online in open access. They can be found on the journal’s website, as well as in bibliographic databases: Central and Eastern European Online Library (from volume 17 onward), Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Index Copernicus and Library of Science (from volume 24 onward) as well as BazHum (up to volume 23). Since 2018, articles in PAM have received DOI identifiers, and in 2019 the ICI Publisher’s Panel editorial portal was launched.
The online presence of articles has resulted in a marked increase in their readership and, consequently, in PAM’s citability: according to the Publish or Perish program, in 2015 the journal’s h-index equaled 7, with 14 PAM citations per year appearing online, and in 2021 the h-index rose to 15 with an annual number of citations of 67. This was also reflected in the scores used by the Polish Ministry of Science to evaluate the performance of academic staff. PAM was first included in the ministry academic journals list in 2012 (4 points). Since then, the number of points awarded for the publication of articles in PAM has increased in subsequent editions of the list (2013 – 7 points, 2015 – 12 points, 2019 – 70 points, 2021 – 100 points). Regardless of the scientometric indicators, the number of PAM citations in titles already indexed in the Scopus database was also one of the assessment factors of PAM’s application to the Scopus database.
The acclaimed position of the “Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean” journal, as confirmed by these indices, is the result of many years of work by Iwona Zych as the chief editor, and the PAM editorial team she created.