[Revista Médica de Chile in the year 2012]

During the year 2012, 539 manuscripts were submitted to this journal, following an increasing trend in the recent decade. Rejection rate was 33%. This higher number of submissions demanded a larger number and wider scope of external reviews, retarding the editorial process. The mean time lapse from reception to acceptance (or rejection) was 6.3 months (range 2-14) and from acceptance to publication 5.3 months (range 3-7). Research articles were 43.9% of published manuscripts and the remaining articles were Reviews, Special Articles, Case Reports, articles on Medical Ethics, Medical Education, Evidence Based Medicine, Public Health, History of Medicine, Letters to the Editor and others. Thirty seven published manuscripts (14.6%) came from foreign countries and 9 of them were published with full text in English. The 2012 Impact Factor was 0.360, showing little variation from previous years, locating the journal in the upper part of quartil 4 in the ISI-JCR category "Medicine, General and Internal", while the SCImago Journal & Country Rank locates the Revista in quartil 2 of its category "Medicine (miscellaneous)". In contrast with the low citation rate, the number of visits to the open access electronic version in www.scielo.cl averages over 3 million visits per year, illustrating that the interest among readers outnumbers the country's expectable readership. Only 22% of articles declared to have received financial help from entities external to the institution where the work was performed, coming mainly from Chilean Governmental competitive funds. The aim of Revista Médica de Chile is to provide readers and authors a valuable source of information about current relevant topics in general and internal medicine, progress in related specialties and updates in basic sciences, rendering them available to Health professionals in Chile and worldwide, following international standards of ethical and scientific quality in medical publications.