This year marks the second of the current editorial team. In this “Editor's page”, the editorial team reviews the previous year of Revista Española de Cardiología (Rev Esp Cardiol) and reports its overall situation and future direction. The impact factor (IF) of 4.485 achieved in 2017 is similar to that obtained the previous year and thus consolidates the bibliometric success of the journal. In addition, we are proud to remain the leading Spanish and bilingual cardiovascular journal. This is perhaps why the demand for publication in Rev Esp Cardiol has increased, which has unfortunately resulted in a high rate of manuscript rejection. Aware of this situation, and prudently deciding to not increase the number of published articles in order to avoid excessive bibliometric fluctuations, this editorial team is considering a new publication envisioned as a secondary journal of Rev Esp Cardiol, with a marked clinical focus and with the aim of stimulating clinical research and academic publication among young cardiologists. In the pages that follow, we analyze the previous year of Rev Esp Cardiol and present our plans for the new journal project.

The total number of articles—specifically, “Original articles”, “Editorials”, “Scientific letters”, “Letters to the Editor”, and “Special articles”—published in Rev Esp Cardiol in 2017 vs previous years is shown in Figure 1. Although there was a slight fall in the number of articles, with a total of 312 vs 335 the previous year, there was an increase in the number of original articles and reviews, which are the two most defining elements of the scientific visibility of a journal. The drop in the number of published articles is primarily due to a lower submission rate for Letters to the Editor (44 fewer), in line with a slight decrease in the total publication demand, which was 1047 manuscripts vs 1160 in the previous year (Figure 2). This decrease also applies to original articles, whose submission rate fell slightly vs the previous year, although the journal still had the second highest demand for publication of original articles of all years (Figure 3).

Figure 1.

Year-on-year comparison of the total number of manuscripts published.

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Figure 2.

Year-on-year comparison of the total number of manuscripts received.

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Figure 3.

Number of original manuscripts received and the acceptance rate from 2010 to 2017. * At the time of publishing this article, there were 22 original articles received in 2017 pending acceptance or rejection.

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As mentioned last year,1 reviews were published on a variety of topics deemed to be of particular interest by the editorial team. During the past year, 10 review articles were published, 3 on cardio-oncology,2–4 2 on advanced therapies for heart failure,5,6 1 on novel technological aspects in cardiology,7 1 on valvular heart diseases,8 1 on imaging,9 1 on cardiac amyloidosis,10 and 1 comprehensive review of biomedical research in the cardiovascular field.11 We wish to congratulate all of the authors for the quality of their work. Importantly, topics for review are usually selected toward the middle of the year in a meeting of the entire editorial team. Any author can propose a specific review topic by submitting an abstract of the review and its sections, with a summary of the authors’ experience in the field. At the meeting of the editorial team, if allowed by the space available for the editorial year, the most suitable reviews will be chosen from all of the proposals received.

One of the most significant quantitative changes has been in the number of scientific letters, which have increased from 74 in 2016 to 84 in 2017 (Figure 1). There are several reasons for this growth; the most important is the decision to increase the number of scientific letters per issue due to the stockpile that had been generated. It was also influenced by the change in the format of the annual updates coordinated by the different scientific sections of the Spanish Society of Cardiology (SEC). This series was published in previous years as special articles but they have been published as scientific letters since 2017 to reinforce their synthetic nature on the novelties of each scientific section. In 2017, 21 scientific letters were published with this format.

As noted last year,1 each issue includes two new sections: the section “Atrium”, which is a synthesis of the contents of each issue with the most salient features of the original articles and editorials published, and the section “Viaje al corazón de las palabras” (Into the heart of terminology), written by Fernando A. Navarro and very well received by our readers.

Regarding the digital version of Rev Esp Cardiol and its presence on social networks, the boost provided by the incorporation of José Juan Gomez de Diego in 2016 as an ICT Consultant continues to yield excellent results (Figure 4). We encourage readers who have not yet done so to follow the journal not only in its digital edition on the website12 and for tablets,13 but also on Twitter (@RevEspCardiol), Facebook14, and our blog.15 We also continue to have outstanding uptake of our Editor's pick.16 In these videos, via a face-to-face interview, an author of a featured article in each issue summarizes the essential concepts of the work and explains its significance.

Figure 4.

Number of sessions on www.revespcardiol.org, overall and via social media, in 2016 and 2017.

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Finally, since April 2017, access to all articles published ahead of print is free only for members of the SEC and subscribers to Rev Esp Cardiol. Elsevier has implemented this change to adapt our situation to that of other journals published by the group.

Figure 5 shows the changes in the times required for the editorial process, specifically from when the authors submit the original version of their manuscript according to the guidelines of Rev Esp Cardiol until the first decision is made. The last year showed a slight increase of 1.4 days in the average processing time for the general editorial process. Although the time from manuscript submission to editor assignment has been slightly reduced, the other two phases have somewhat increased, particularly the time from editor assignment to article dispatch to the reviewer. This increase was, however, small and cannot be attributed to the learning curve of the new editorial team during this second year, and the tendency for the next year should be for a reduction. What continues to improve is the work performed by our reviewers (Figure 6), whom we would like to sincerely thank again. We would also like to convey our gratitude to all reviewers who collaborate with Rev Esp Cardiol despite not belonging to our Editorial Committee (Table 1). For the quantity, quality, and speed of their evaluations, the elite reviewers of 2017 also deserve special mention (Table 2).

Figure 5.

Mean manuscript processing time for initial submissions between 2009 and 2017.

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Figure 6.

Response time for Rev Esp Cardiol reviewers for first drafts of original articles (data from the first 6 months of each year).

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Compared with previous years, the full incorporation of the new editorial process involving the serial management of the two versions (Spanish and English) has significantly reduced the time from manuscript acceptance to its electronic publication, at least its publication in the original submission language. The average time between acceptance and ahead of print publication in the language of submission for original articles is currently less than 7 weeks. The version in the complementary language takes about 11 to 12 additional weeks. Readers will recall that the new process involves rapid editing and publication of the version in the original language of submission, which allows the article in its original version to be made quickly available ahead of print and, therefore, in the bibliographic databases (eg, ScienceDirect), in addition to the Rev Esp Cardiol website.12 If the language of the original version is English, the article additionally becomes immediately available on PubMed. We would also like to take this opportunity to comment on a proposal that we have received, namely, encouraging Spanish as the initial language for manuscript submission. Undoubtedly, one of the strengths of Rev Esp Cardiol is its bilingual nature; we are very proud of this characteristic and believe that it boosts the presence of Spanish at the cutting edge of cardiovascular research. However, there are two indisputable facts: the language of scientific expression is English, and the scientific visibility of an article is directly related to the speed of publication after acceptance. Thus, precisely to improve the scientific visibility of their work, many Spanish-speaking authors have opted in recent years to submit their manuscripts directly in English. If accepted, these articles quickly appear on PubMed, encouraging their dissemination. Sometimes, these articles have been rejected by international journals publishing in English alone and are subsequently submitted to Rev Esp Cardiol. This requires an extra effort from our reviewers, most of whom are Spanish speakers, who often have to perform their work in English. Accordingly, that they continue to maintain excellent response times (Figure 6) is even more commendable.

Finally, a periodic review of the publication guidelines for Rev Esp Cardiol17 was performed in 2017 to ensure that they are kept up to date with international criteria18,19 and our own style standards. We have taken advantage of this opportunity to greatly expand the instructions to authors in order to facilitate the manuscript submission process and have included a new section on frequently asked questions.20

The IF of Rev Esp Cardiol was consolidated, although it fell very slightly vs the previous year. As readers undoubtedly know, the IF increases with a higher number of citations generated by articles in a journal and a lower number of citable items, specifically original articles and reviews, in the previous 2 years. In the latest version, the IF has declined very slightly, perhaps due to the increase in the number of citable articles, because the total number of citations (731) has increased vs the previous year (717). Moreover, the total number of external citations received is the highest in the entire history of Rev Esp Cardiol. Figure 7 shows the bibliometric evolution of Rev Esp Cardiol, which was placed in the second quartile of cardiovascular journals, in position 33 among a total of 126 journals, in the 2016 edition of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) (Figure 8).

Figure 7.

Changes in the impact factor of Rev Esp Cardiol since 1999.

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Figure 8.

Changes in the ranking of Rev Esp Cardiol among other journals in the field of cardiovascular medicine according to their impact factors.

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As already shown in last year's “Editor's page”,1 we believe that it is important to know which of the research articles and reviews published in the journal have had the highest scientific dissemination and visibility in recent years. The publications of 2014 and 2015 influence the IF of JCR for 2016, while those published in 2015 and 2015 influence the IF for 2017; those published in 2017 influence the immediacy index, a reflection of the speed of the scientific visibility of a publication. Table 3 shows this information, extracted from the Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics56 at the start of 2018. We would like to warmly congratulate all of the authors of these articles. Finally, as in every year, we must mention and commend the authors of the publications that have received awards conferred by the SEC based on scientific impact and quality (Table 4).

In recent years, and in parallel with its increased international visibility, Rev Esp Cardiol has recorded a notable and growing demand for publication that cannot be satisfied with its current capacity. As an example, of the 1047 manuscripts received in 2017, Rev Esp Cardiol has so far rejected 686 (66%), with 22 manuscripts pending decision at the time of publishing this Editor's page.

To explore the final destination of the original manuscripts rejected by this editorial team, we searched the Web of Science56 for the first 249 manuscripts received for publication as original articles that were ultimately rejected (Table 5). Of these articles, 110 (44.2%) were found in this database, although only 79 (31.7%) were published in indexed journals, most with an IF lower than that of Rev Esp Cardiol. In fact, only 1 of them was finally published in a journal with an IF markedly higher than that of our journal (International Journal of Cardiology), whereas 6 were published in journals with a similar IF, although in the first quartile. Perhaps the most revealing statistic is that the 110 published articles generated only 67 citations, less than 1 per article, and only 7 generated more than 2 citations. Although careful interpretation of these data is required because the research was performed in a limited sample and by a single researcher, from our point of view, two conclusions may be drawn. The first is that, in general, the editorial team has shown good judgment in the selection of original manuscripts for the journal, because virtually none of the rejected articles generated a large number of citations after their publication in other journals. Moreover, most of the journals with a certain IF to which the rejected articles were submitted were quite specific journals, whose area of interest might lie outside that of the average reader of Rev Esp Cardiol. Secondly, and more importantly, there is a critical mass of original articles submitted to Rev Esp Cardiol that, although ultimately rejected, are of sufficient quality for dissemination to other publications.

Although the logical strategies to decrease the rejection rate would be to increase the number of articles in each issue of Rev Esp Cardiol and/or increase their frequency, such strategies would lead to a short-term decrease in the IF. However, the most important and reasonable conclusion is that the average quality level of original articles and reviews could be undermined, which would also have an impact on bibliometrics and prestige.

Nonetheless, the editorial team of Rev Esp Cardiol believes that a good number of the rejected manuscripts could be of more than sufficient quality to constitute a secondary journal title and has thus explored the feasibility and characteristics of this editorial project. The team believes that there is sufficient volume to publish up to 4 issues a year of a second title including 5 original articles in each issue, noting that this would encompass only between 10% and 15% of the original articles rejected by Rev Esp Cardiol. In this context, in November 2017, the Executive Committee of the SEC approved the creation of a second title, also edited by Elsevier and under the guise of a secondary journal, which is scheduled to be launched in 2019. The objective is to develop a new preferably online-only journal with an initial run of 4 issues a year in Spanish, a format similar to that of Rev Esp Cardiol, an independent editorial team, and a similar but eminently clinical focus, favoring original clinical research involving patients, training reviews on clinical matters, and observations and clinical cases. We encourage readers of Rev Esp Cardiol to contribute to the success of the new title by submitting their experimental results, observations, and clinical cases. In addition, one of the objectives of this publication is to enhance academic publication and clinical research among young cardiologists. We are convinced that, with the talent and enthusiasm found in Spanish and Latin American cardiology, the new project will be a success.

Rev Esp Cardiol is the official scientific publication of the SEC and serves as one of its vehicles of expression. The preceding year has seen consolidation of the bibliometric impact of Rev Esp Cardiol and demand for publication, which has resulted in a high rejection rate. For this reason, a project is underway to develop a new publication as a “secondary journal” of Rev Esp Cardiol, which hopefully can see the light of day at the beginning of next year and help to give more visibility to Spanish clinical research and academic publication.