Bibliometric indicators of Medicina Clínica y Social

Abstract

Dear readers and authors, Medicina Clínica y Social started its academic life in 2017, and over the years has achieved several milestones in terms of indexing to high-impact national, regional, and global databases. Starting with DOAJ in 2020, SciELO Paraguay in 2021, Redalyc in 2022 with a rating of excellent, culminating with its entry to SCOPUS in 2023, a historic milestone as the first Paraguayan journal to enter this prestigious global database and after one year of its entry we already have a quartile within SCIMAGO, being the only Q4 journal in Paraguay to date (1).

Let us analyze what SCIMAGO presented during the 2019-2023 period of the journal. First, it is in position 59 in Latin America in the category of medicine (miscellaneous) with an SJR of 0.12, an H-index of 3, 78 articles, and 18 citations (0.18 citations per document) (2). This presents us with a challenge in terms of considerably improving the citations that we can receive in SCOPUS, since, if we make a broader analysis in Google Scholar, we find another scenario where there is a greater number of citations at a global level.

Before proceeding with the overall bibliometric analysis, I will present the definition of SJR. SJR is a size-independent prestige indicator that ranks journals based on their "average prestige per article.” It is based on the idea that "not all citations are equal”. SJR is a measure of the scientific influence of journals, which considers both the number of citations a journal receives and the importance or prestige of the journals from which these citations originate. Measures the scientific influence of a journal's average article and expresses how central a journal's average article is to global scientific discussions (1).

For this reason, we can find more articles and citations outside of SCIMAGO by looking at the raw data in SCOPUS. After joining SCOPUS, 168 articles were reported that received 92 citations in total, with an average of 18.4 citations per year and 0.55 citations per article, assuming an H-index of 4. This also changes if we consider the articles cited according to Google Scholar (which collects citations from more resources and is not limited to scientific journal articles).

Considering Google Scholar, there are 222 articles published from 2017 to 2024, with a total of 937 citations (896 in the last five years) with an H-index of 17 (16 in the last five years) (3). Efforts should focus on improving international collaboration, thus improving the impact in impact journals to improve the quartile and quality of our editorial efforts.