Dear Editor,

I was pleased to see the introduction of a letter to the editor in the AMJ. This short review explores the importance of "Letter To the Editor" (LTE) and its impact on research. In the field of academic writing the term LTE is broadly used to refer to a group of articles where the author usually comments on a previously published work. Some journals publish these articles in the "Correspondence" section or tend to use the term "Letter" for these common format of papers; however, an LTE is treated as a real paper. The peer review process of LTEs is almost the same to the other types of manuscripts and they all go under the standard review procedure. Some journals employ a section editor known as "Editor of Letters" who may decide to judge on such manuscripts or send them to others for reviewing; but, the process of accepting the LTEs is faster than other types of manuscripts.

IMPACT OF LTE ON SCIENCE

A letter to the editor can focus on a current issue of the science but it is mostly consisted of comments of a reader on a newly published work (usually the last six month) in the target journal; however, there is no fixed time limit and the journals govern their own rules of publishing every kind of articles including LTEs. The content of an LTE can be either a critique or a comment on the cited paper; moreover, some editors even accept short communications in the condition that the author makes it more brief and re-written in the format of LTE. When the LTE consists of comment(s) on other works it may conclude with development of a new hypothesis. In this case, the cited paper works as a trigger for the

development of such idea in the mind of the reader (i.e. the author of the LTE). This idea in turn shed the light on a direction of future research and the proposed hypothesis can be examined by the author of LTE him/herself or anyone else. Moreover, in the case that the idea includes the regional comparison or needs to assess the effect of sociodemographic, genetic or environmental differences on the variable of interest, this article expresses the start point of a multicenter research in which both the authors of LTE and the cited paper will work in a team.

DOES IT COST TO BE PUBLISHED?

It should not be forgotten that the LTEs are rarely accepted for publication unless they are well written and the author proposes a new method or idea the conclusion of the letter. In the world that cost-effectiveness is the basis of development of market strategies in publishing scientific materials, only the eye catching LTEs have the chance of getting more citations and are guaranteed to help increase the Impact Factor of the target journal.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian,

website: http://www.drmehrdad.com

Author affiliation:

Corresponding Author:

Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian,

Research Center of Iranian Blood Transfusion

Organization, Khorasan-e Razavi Blood

Center, Mashhad, Iran

Email: mehrdad.medic@gmail.com

Author affiliation:

Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian,

website: http://www.drmehrdad.com