Impact of Cuban´s Health Research Published in National Journals: are there reasons for urgent intervention?

Abstract

Introduction: there is a lack of correspondence between the visibility achieved by an important part of health scientific publication of Cuba and their citation indices. The data collected show that national journals published in the area of health play an important role in these results. Objective: to show the behavior of citation indices of national Cuban´s medical journals regarding published by a group of selected countries in Latin America in the period 2009-2013. Results: Cuba, with a total similar to that of Chile and Colombia journals, showed, however, the lowest level of average citation from 7 countries analyzed (0.05). Notable differences between the levels of citation of contributions published in Cuban and international journals in the field of Medicine, with marked predominance of the average number of citations of articles published by foreign journals are observed. Only 420 contributions (10.7%) of 3904 identified in national journals between 2009 and 2013 were cited at least once in the past year. A total of 15 journals were identified with more than 100 contributions published between 2009 and 2013 not cited in the last year. Medicine is a critical knowledge area in citation indices not only on the health sciences but also in the overall statistics of the country because the volume of their contributions. Conclusions: the low rates of citation of contributions published in Cuban health journals and in particular those belonging to the Medicine category, is a compelling reason to promote to make decisions, and take actions planned and agreed with a view to raise their consumption levels internationally. Key Words: citation index, Cuban´s health journals.