A few years ago, before inclusion in MEDLINE, we sent a submission to index the Journal in one of the private databases that provide indicators such as the impact factor. After a long wait, we got the decision, which was rejection, of course. The publisher provided few reasons, but one of them was that the journal was not published in English. Not surprisingly, not publishing in English will reduce the likelihood of getting citations in first-world journals that are indexed in those same databases operated by private publishers. With few or no citations, the journal is hard-pressed to demonstrate that, in this widely used system to measure impact in the academic world, it actually has impact. Is the impact factor the only measure of impact? We believe it is not.

Medwave has a very good way of showing impact – article level metrics. Those metrics reflect dissemination in social networks. We also use other indicators, such as number of unique visits a day, or per month. We have achieved an important milestone this October because there was one day when we surpassed 20.000 unique visitors, giving us an average of 15.000 unique visitors for this month. Additionally, we will soon reactivate metrics of HTML views and PDF downloads that we had to interrupt for technical reasons.

Other ways of assessing impact is by looking at the numbers of new users that register in the journal every day. These new users come from different countries of the region and Spain. With time, our user mix (includes authors and reviewers) has gradually diversified from being strongly Chile-based, to being mostly international.

This brings us to August, when one of the most important landmarks occurred in the short history of this journal since it became peer-reviewed: we were able to publish a whole issue in English. Deposits in MEDLINE were done accordingly, and all articles appear as being published in English and Spanish. Interested readers may consult in the following link where they can find the cover for that issue: www.medwave.cl/link.cgi/English/6264.act.

Truth said this is a great accomplishment. We strived to create an international platform to publish a general biomedical journal with nice graphics, world-class quality and relatively short time-to-decision wait. We have been able to prove, as well, that we have a broad and loyal readership base. We always envisioned that this platform would be enabled to publish in more than one language, and English was the major pending task. At one point, we also considered doing in-house translations of the articles, but the costs turned out to be inaccessible. The surprise was that the authors whose manuscripts had been accepted for publication began to send in good-quality translations when we requested them. We are very much aware that it is not easy to produce good translations in the medical field, which is why we especially appreciate the effort in submitting translations that we have been able to publish in spite of not copyediting them.

To conclude, we wish to thank our readers who follow us faithfully and our authors who choose to submit their manuscripts to us. The editorial team is always keen on improving our processes, endeavoring to attain increasingly more professional standards. Our main purpose is to give long life to our journal, in part by always staying in tune to the needs of Spanish-speaking countries and to the rest of the world, now by having our articles appear in English as well.

Esta obra de Medwave está bajo una licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial 3.0 Unported. Esta licencia permite el uso, distribución y reproducción del artículo en cualquier medio, siempre y cuando se otorgue el crédito correspondiente al autor del artículo y al medio en que se publica, en este caso, Medwave.