[Impact factor of the Spanish medical journals]

The 2001 edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) includes only 13 Spanish medical journals. The impact factor (IF) of the rest of Spanish medical journals is unknown. The aim of this study is to determine the IF of the main Spanish medical journals, taking also into account the references from journals not covered by the SCI.

A set of 87 Spanish medical journals was selected from the national database IME and other international databases. All citable articles published in these journals in 2001 were analyzed, extracting their bibliographic references to articles published in 1999, 2000 and 2001. The indicators obtained for each journal were the number of cites, the IF and the immediacy index.

Among the 87 source journals, 74 were not included in the JCR. From them, 5,388 bibliographic references were examined, identifying the journals cited. Final indicators were obtained adding these results to the ones obtained by using the Science Citation Index. The most cited journal was Medicina Clinica (768 cites), and the highest IF were attained by Histology and Histopathology (IF = 1.866), International Journal of Developmental Biology (IF = 1.654) and Medicina Clinica (IF = 1.125).

This work has permitted to obtain the IF of 87 Spanish medical journals. Already detected in previous works, the leadership of the journal Medicina Clinica in Spanish medicine is confirmed. Spanish medical journals published in English have received a small number of cites from the ones published in Spanish. A low impact factor is not necessarily related to lack of quality, merit or relevance.