[Scientific production in international journals by Acta Médica Portuguesa authors]

Local and national scientific journals have been widely criticized by some authors. Additionally, they are quite rarely indexed at international databases, which results in a reduced visibility of their articles.

To analyze international scientific productions of authors publishing in Acta Medica Portuguesa during 2008.

A database with all the authors publishing in Acta Medica Portuguesa in 2008 was built. In July 2009, production of all those authors from the previous five years (2003-2007) was retrieved from Science Citation Index. Journals where they published, Impact Factors of those journals, articles' references, and times cited were analyzed.

The 78 articles published by Acta Medica Portuguesa in 2008 were produced by 259 different authors. Ninety four (36.3%) of those authors wrote 420 articles from 2003 to 2007 indexed at Science Citation Index. These articles were published in 249 different journals, with an average Impact Factor of 2.973 (SD = 2.92). Journal with highest Impact Factor was The Lancet (IF2008 = 28.409) with two papers published. Eighty seven of those authors received some citation to their articles, with a total amount of 5001 cites. Out of the 14035 references on those 420 articles, only 10 cited any article published in Acta Médica Portuguesa.

Authors publishing in Acta Médica Portuguesa produce a good amount of international publications in journals with an acceptable Impact Factor and they receive quite a good number of citations. Conversely, these authors when publishing in international journals have an extremely low citation of articles published in Acta Médica Portuguesa.