Dear editor:

Scientometrics is an effective method to evaluate the scientific production of biomedical journals [1]. It provides an overview of the situation of scientific research of a journal and objectively measures its growth or decline [2].

It was a pleasure to read the manuscript of Gallardo-Sánchez et al [3], where they displayed the main scientometric indicators of Medwave through 2010-2015 that provides the “Publish or Perish” website.

We thought it would be also appropriate to identify the scientometric indicators that Scopus gives us [4] (Table 1)

Table 1. Scientometric indicators of Medwave according to Scopus.

Medwave belongs to journals in the fourth quartile, with an SJR index of 0.100, and an impact factor of 0.045. But it should be noted that this database only analyzes the contributions from 2014 onwards. The impact factor obtained from ResearchGate [5] is slightly higher with 0.07.

In recent years, successful editorial policies were launched that have undoubtedly improved Medwave indicators. We can mention the adoption of a continuous publication format that has speeded up the time between acceptance and publication of manuscripts, incorporating the Open Journal System (OJS), the referencing system CrossRef and the DOI system[6].

This has led to the incorporation and permanence of this journal in databases of high prestige as MEDLINE / PubMed, Scopus, Latindex, LILACS and DOAJ; in addition to the successful editorial decision of increasing its visibility in social networks like Facebook and ReseachGate.

Another interesting result is the contributions by country: Chile stands out with 49 manuscripts (Table 2). These results are provided by the database PubMed[7]. Despite having contributions from 38 countries, we don’t found items of international collaboration which is an important indicator to assess the quality of the journal

Table 2. Countries with major contributions to Medwave according to PubMed.

Finally, we agree with the authors when they raise that scientometric indicators "are especially useful when designing policies to visualize a journal and display its productivity"[3]. However, no recommendations that would be of special interest to the editorial team are proposed.

We therefore express the following recommendations for the sake of improving the quality and visibility of this journal:

• To enhance authorship and international collaboration.
• To use social networks, especially scientific networks as Academia.edu, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and others.
• To stimulate authors to place the manuscripts in institutional repositories and social networks.
• To index the journal in databases such as: Wiley, SciELO, Dialnet, EBSCO, Redalyc, Index Copernicus, Ulrich's, Imbiomed and others.

It is a long and full of work way, but the future perspective must be to gain the preference of readers, and increase the quality and impact of the publication.  

Notes

From the editor
The authors originally submitted this article in Spanish and English. The Journal has not copyedited this English version.

Declaration of conflicts of interest
Authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Financing
The authors declare not having received any funding whatsoever for writing this letter

Table 1. Scientometric indicators of Medwave according to Scopus.

Table 2. Countries with major contributions to Medwave according to PubMed.

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