EDITORIAL. Leer versus citar un trabajo. Análisis de nuestras publicaciones en los últimos años.

Abstract

In this editorial, I want to focus on a dilemma: Is the citation of a paper much better than accessing and reading it? What is more important for science in real life? A citation may be relevant, but accessing a journal’s article could be crucial if it has some application. Our inclusion in Crossref has permitted us to determine the communicational impact of the published articles as a measure of their reading extension, revealing a monthly mean of 1050 readings this year. As we expected, most of the readings came from COVID-19 issues and review articles. Another metric of our publications is related to the number of visitors to our journal web page: in 2021, we received 1300 visits. On the other hand, our pres-ence in WoS and Scopus has shown a modest impact on citations, which is more evident in WoS. About different papers published on the subject, Hirsh 1 pointed out that the journal’s impact increases if the readers pay more attention to review articles instead of primary re-search articles. The H-index is another metric used to determine the journal’s impact based on the number of citations. According to Scopus, our journal has an H-index of 22. Jeang 2 mentions, in his article about the H-Index and the differences between the frequency of citations and accessing, that a higher number of readings can produce an increased number of citations. But conversely, a high number of citations of one article does not imply a high number of readings. Finally, in the work of Shanta et al. 3 they concluded that the accurate measurement of the impact of a paper is the number of times a medical practitioner uses the information contained in that paper to improve the quality of the treatment. For our part, we will advocate striving to ensure that the works we publish have sufficient quality to be cited but also to be presented to arouse interest in its reading and their results put into practice.