In this editorial we want to highlight the very notable upward trend that the journal Clínica e Investigación en Arteriosclerosis has kept up in recent years, in terms of its value and scientific quality. The journal is in a good position and we must thank all the professionals involved for their effort and collaboration; professionals who, from their different fields, have worked for years in order that the content of the journal would include articles of growing interest, both for clinical practice and experimental research into vascular pathology.
To briefly describe the evolution of the journal's quality indicators, it should be mentioned, by way of introduction, that Clínica e Investigación en Arteriosclerosis is indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) database, which is part of the Web of Science (WoS), owned by the company Clarivate. Clarivate has progressively integrated ESCI within the rest of the databases that appear annually in the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR) where journals are assigned a score in the different reference indexes published by the JCR. Among these, the best known is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The JIF quotes the average number of citations received in a year, for papers published in a given journal during the previous two years and is the best-known indicator of the relevance of a scientific journal. However, the JCR also publishes other indicators that enable us to gain a broader and deeper view of its scientific value and its position among the journals devoted to vascular pathology.
In mid-2023 we published the long-awaited news that the journal of the Spanish Society of Arteriosclerosis had achieved the assignment of impact factor, a fact which we could consider as a great step forward in increasing its scientific standard and enabling us to aspire to placing the journal in a prominent position on the stage of journals in its field. A year later, the good news is that, according to data from the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR), the JIF for Clínica e Investigación en Arteriosclerosis increased from 1.6 in 2022 to 1.9 in 2023, which places it in quartile 3 of the area of "Peripheral Vascular Disease".
The journal is also indexed in Scopus, owned by Elsevier, where it is given other quality indicators such as the CiteScore, which measures the average number of citations received per article published over a 4-year period, and which has increased from 1.8 in 2020 to 3.2 in 2023. Likewise, the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicates the number of times an average article is cited in a given journal and although, for this reason, it is similar to the JIF, it differs in that, instead of counting each citation as one, which is how the JIF works, the SJR assigns a value greater or less than 1.00 to each citation, according to the score of the journal it is citing. The JRS is calculated from the Scopus database and includes a three-year follow-up. In 2021, the JRS for Clínica e Investigación en Arteriosclerosis was 0.32 and in 2023 it had increased to 0.42.
Finally, in the JCR, the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) should be highlighted; this a standardised indicator that is based on the citations received during the year of calculation and the previous three years, on the documents published in the previous 3 years. In other words, JCI reports on the position that the journal has with respect to the average number of citations in the specialty over the previous 3 years. The JCI increased from 0.31 in 2020 to 0.39 in 2023, which places our journal in quartile 3 with a position of 67 out of a total of 94 journals in its category. Our position in the third quartile, both of JFI and JCI, after the relatively short time that has elapsed since the allocation of the impact factor, is very positive, however this now poses a new challenge for us: to move up to the second quartile. We are taking part, therefore, in an exciting long-distance race. The rules of the game are simple: we must follow the upward trend regarding the quality of the articles received by Clínica e Investigación en Arteriosclerosis so that they are increasingly cited by the scientific community.