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     Evaluating the importance of the scientific publications is both difficult and worrying. When assessing a curriculum vitae (labour exchange, professional promotion, academic selection, grants, research subsidies, etc), some criteria are considered in order to determine the value that should be given to publications as an indicator of the professional's research capacity. However, there are not specific and standard regulations in order to control that. In fact, the ambiguity and the disparity in criteria have been known to be the cause of curricular craftiness whose aim has been to get the highest assessments in a short period of time (publications in instalments, change of authorship, trivial articles, etc).¹ Recently, some people have complained about the traditional methods to assess publications "by weight", which had provided the scientific heritage with mediocre and useless products, warning about the need to combine quantitative and qualitative indicators which would result in a less biased assessment.²
     No doubt, the fact that assessment centers have included impact bibliometric indicators as criteria which should be considered has been a great step forward. It is clear that they do not solve the problem, because they are of no significance unless they come together with more qualitative processes that determine the intrinsic quality of the contributions according to their pertinence, rigor, uselfulness.³ But nowadays, it is unquestionable the positive effect of bibliometry, specially on contexts different to the hegemonic ones, where it has led to productive reflection amongst researchers about the need to overcome their traditional isolation. The problem arises when a reaction of positive nature (sharing knowledge with other cultural contexts) has an evil effect, such as the radical attachment to strange products to the detriment of the own ones.
     It has happened when some assessment agencies have taken the Impact Factor (IF) of the Science Citation Index (SCI), database of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) of Philadelphia (United States) as the only system of bibliographic assessment, which is maybe very useful to analyze the most internationally visible scientific production, but it is useless to know about the scientific production of local interest⁴, specially the one published out of its sphere of influence with an Anglo-Saxon accent.⁵ In order to understand that, suffice it to say that according to the logic of the SCI, a Spanish nurse researcher should prefer to publish in an English medical journal of recognizable impact rather than in a nursing Spanish journal of higher circulation.
     If we start from the limitation that the bibliometric indicators are not designed to evaluate the articles individually, but to classify the journals in which they are published when there is an only source of classification (SCI), the resulting effect is that an important part of the scientific production formally disappears and amongst that we find the articles published in Latin American nursing journals, which are systematically excluded from the SCI. It must be big business to specify the orthodox scientific area (Anglo-Saxon biomedical literature) because Index Foundation was requested by the Institute for Scientific Information to remove from its Web page the bibliometric indicators that have been published since 1993 and that refer to the impact of the Latin American nursing journals. These indicators, now grouped in CUIDEN database, partly cushion the excluding effect of other sources such as the SCI. Incomprehensible as it may seem, there are some government agencies in Latin American countries that still consider the SCI as the only source to evaluate knowledge, and it obliges them to make invisible and to discredit their own knowledge. That is not the case of the Quality, Accreditation and Prospective Agency of the universities of Madrid, which determines that the assessment of the academic and scientific production⁶ as well as its spreading have to be done through the impact index in those journals in which it is already known and in those in which it has been calculated. It makes it possible to use some other sources apart from the SCI. More specifically, the General Management of Personnel and Professional Development of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) states in its recently approved personnel selection system (Order of October 18, 2005) that the impact indicators of Cuiden Citación will be used for the assignment of scientific merits to professionals of the B group (nursing, physiotherapy, social work, occupational therapy, etc).⁷ It means that at least Andalusian nurses are known for publishing their articles in nursing journals with impact in their territorial scope of publication, so that if they do not want, they do not have to move to other disciplines and latitudes.
     CUIDEN citación is one of the database of Index Foundation about the knowledge management in a virtual environment.⁸ It includes the most important indicators of impact, repercussion, activity and consumption of information on nursing in the areas of Spanish and Portuguese linguistic influence. Amongst the indicators included, the Impact Index called Immediate Repercussion stands out and it is currently been used by external assessment agencies in order to assess scientific production of applicants to teaching and clinical positions.
     The information included in CUIDEN citación comes from bibliometric studies that the Documentary Study Group of Index Foundation has been carrying out for more than a decade. These studies are based on the analysis of the bibliographic references in a list of selected journals, which we will call source journals, amongst the list of indexed nursing journals in CUIDEN. The analysis of the references consists of the revision of all citations and the selection of the ones that belong to nursing journals. It results in an index of nursing journals cited by the source journals. We are talking about a list of journals consulted by the authors who have published in the source journals that have been essential for the writing of their works. Therefore, we refer to the visible journals that, in the end, define the list of journals cited amongst the ones that could be cited.
     The selection of the source journals from which to get the bibliographic citations is carried out by using the following criteria: they must be included in CUIDEN database, they must have an Immediate Repercussion different from zero in previous studies, they must have three or more citations in previous analysis to the year of the study, they must be emergent journals with more than two citations in the analysis of the current year and that meeting or not the requirements, there were source journals in previous analysis.
     CUIDEN Citación has four search options that make it possible to locate the bibliometric indicators of the nursing journals cited by the whole list of the source journals chosen:
     -Immediate Repercussion. This option allows to identify the value of the main impact index, the immediate repercussion of the source journals. Besides, it offers additional information, the immediate index that is the result of dividing the number of times that a journal is cited during the year of study into the number of articles published that year. It allows to know the immediacy with which the published articles are cited.
     -Historic Repercussion. That is the grade in which a journal is cited per production unit -new article published-. It gives information about the importance and the level of consumption of a journal in a scientific community. It can be calculated by dividing the total number of times that a source journal is cited into the number of articles published during the year of analysis.
     -Historic Repercussion without self-citations. That is the degree in which a journal is cited by the rest of the source journals per production unit -new article published-. It allows to know about the Historic Repercussion of a journal without considering the effect of the self-citations. It gives information about the importance and the level of consumption of a journal in a scientific community, but it does not take into account the bias associated with self-citations because we know that generally speaking, journals tend to cite themselves rather than citing other journals. It can be calculated by dividing the total number of citations (taking away self-citations) of a source journal into the number of articles published during the year of analysis. This search menu offers additional information about the number of self-citations and the percentage of self-citations of every source journal.
     -Index of cited journals. This is a search menu that allows to locate all the nursing journals cited by the source journal, whether they belong or not to the area of Spanish and Portuguese linguistic influence. There is a list of some hundred titles of nursing journals from more than fifteen countries.
     Therefore, CUIDEN Citación is an instrument that makes it possible to measure the impact of nursing journals of the area of Spanish and Portuguese linguistic influence, their visibility and their consumption. It considers thousands of citations of nursing journals and it defines a list of visible journals in opposition to these which are not visible.^8,9 Not appearing in the citation indexes of CUIDEN Citación means that the journal in question does not exist, that means, that from the list of journals that could be cited- which are published in this linguistic and disciplinary area- the authors just cite some of them. In the Catalogue of Periodicals -REHIC- of Index Foundation, there are 227 nursing journals indexed. Most of these, which are mainly journals that could be cited, just a quarter are cited and just the 14% meet the requirements to be considered source journals. Furthermore, not visible journals coincide with the ones that do not pay much attention to their spreading, whose collections are unfinished or not updated in CUIDEN. The relationship between the impact of a nursing journal and its indexation in CUIDEN is a proved fact.¹⁰ The citation to a periodical is related to the accessibility to its scientific production. The accessibility to our means would be determined by its indexation in the collection and database which are normally consulted by the potential users of a discipline. In this case, an inadequate indexation in CUIDEN, usual means of bibliographic consultation of nurses, would mean a loss of opportunity for its consumption and citation, even if the journal is free and has free digital access.
     Authors and assessment agencies should bear in mind that publishing an article in order to make it visible is not enough and that it must be published in a specific journal in order to be read and cited afterwards. It is thanks to CUIDEN Citación that we know about nursing journals published in the areas of Spanish and Portuguese linguistic influence.

References

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2. Figueredo Gaspari E. Valoración curricular de las publicaciones científicas Med clínica 2005; 125(17):661-665
3. Camí J. Impactolatría: diagnóstico y tratamiento. Medicina Clínica 1997;109(13):515-524.
4. Bordons M, Zulueta MA. Evaluación de la actividad científica a través de indicadores bibliométricos. Rev Esp Cardiol 1999; 52: 790-800.
5. Gálvez Toro A, Amezcua M, Hueso Montoro C. El autor evaluado: impacto de las publicaciones periódicas. Evidentia 2006 mar-abr; 3(8). En: http://www.index-f.com/evidentia/n8/217articulo.php [Consultado el 5-03-2006].
6. RESOLUCIÓN de 29 de noviembre de 2005, del Presidente de la Agencia de Calidad, Acreditación y Prospectiva de las Universidades de Madrid, por la que se aprueba la convocatoria de evaluación o informe positivo para la contratación como profesor universitario por las universidades de Madrid y se abre el plazo de presentación de solicitudes BOCM nº 307 de 26 de diciembre de 2005.
7. RESOLUCION de 18 de octubre de 2005, de la Dirección General de Personal y Desarrollo Profesional del Servicio Andaluz de Salud, por la que se dispone la publicación del Pacto de Mesa Sectorial de Sanidad suscrito entre la Administración Sanitaria de Andalucía- SAS y las organizaciones sindicales CEMSATSE, CC.OO., UGT y CSI-CSIF, sobre sistema de selección de personal estatutario temporal para puestos básicos en el Servicio Andaluz de Salud. BOJA nº 211 de octubre de 2005. Pp. 37-61.
8. Gálvez Toro A, Hueso Montoro C, Amezcua M. Indicadores CUIDEN de repercusión de las revistas de enfermería del área lingüística del español y del portugués. Index Enferm 2004; 46:76-80.
9. Gálvez Toro A, Hueso Montoro C y Amezcua M. Consumo de Información de las revistas de enfermería del área lingüística del español y del portugués (año 2002). Desarrollo Científico de Enfermería, 2004, 12(3):69-76.
10. Gálvez Toro A. Un modelo explicativo de la pauta de citación de las revistas españolas de enfermería. Enfermería Clínica, 2002; 12(5):210-216.