Endocrinology, diabetes and nutrition: The future is here

Endocrinología y Nutrición, the journal of the Spanish Society of Diabetes (SED) and the Spanish Society of Endocrinology and Nutrition (SEEN), reaches a new milestone in its history. This is the last volume of the journal with the name it has had during the last decades.

Endocrinología y Nutrición is a journal that can boast of a long track record, although this has been fraught with difficulties and uncertainties at different times. The last ten years may be considered as the miracle decade, which started in 2007 with the disappointment, already experienced by successive editors, of an unsuccessful application for indexing at PubMed. Crises often lead to renewed effort and strategies, which in this case resulted in a new stage aimed at achieving what we had not been able to reach previously. The editorial board, headed by José Manuel Gómez, with the complicity of a vast minority of members of SEEN, designed a strategy and strived to achieve this goal. Inclusion of the journal in this reference medical index was finally achieved in 2009.¹ This represented an inflection point in the history of our journal in the last years.

The next step in progression of quality and visibility of the journal was undoubtedly its inclusion in the main reference index of the impact of scientific publications, i.e. the Science Citation Index (Thomson Reuters). This was requested soon after inclusion of the journal in PubMed, in 2010. The final answer to this application was expected to take a long time. However, this did not prevent from continued actions aimed at achieving a better positioning of the journal and a greater quality of its scientific contents. In this attempt to increase the quality and visibility of the journal, bilingual edition of its whole contents was another very good decision. This represented at the time an important financial effort, which has undoubtedly been cost-effective when seen from the current perspective. Since 2011, the journal is published both in Spanish and English,² which has increased its worldwide visibility. The long-awaited response from Thomson was not received until 2013, when we heard the bad news that inclusion of our journal in the Science Citation Index had not been approved.

The situation of Endocrinología y Nutrición has substantially changed after incorporation of the track record and scientific potential of the journal Avances en Diabetología, the former organ of SED, into a new stage for both publications. After more than two years of vicissitudes and work by the governing boards of the SED and SEEN, and the editorial boards, an agreement was reached to join efforts for sharing a single scientific publication common to both institutions. This occurred in 2015, and the journal became the scientific publication of both associations.³ Immediately thereafter, on July 2015, a new application for inclusion in the Science Citation Index was filed. This was undoubtedly a new turning point in the life of the journal. To our surprise, on that same year, only a few months after application, we heard the great news that inclusion of Endocrinología y Nutrición in that quality index had been approved. We had finally taken off as a scientific journal with the visibility that many of us had long yearned for.

During the past decade, there has been a continuous increase in the number of manuscripts, especially original articles, submitted to the journal. The total number of manuscripts received in 2016 will be approximately 300. The proportion of manuscripts rejected has passed from 70% to the current 10%, which is in line with the percentages in first-class scientific journals and guarantees quality and exigency to authors. The reasons for this are on the one hand the limitation of pages that may be published and, on the other hand, the more stringent scientific criteria applied by the editorial board, which should be understood by the contributing authors and should also act as a stimulus. International visibility has continuously increased, as shown by the more than two million pages visited in our web site in 2015 and by a very substantial increase in visibility in ScienceDirect, both in Spanish and English. The best data to end this stage of the journal is an impact factor value of 1.314 in 2015.

A new stage opens for the journal, which will also change its name, but not its contents. The terms that define the medical specialty of one of the societies, i.e. endocrinology and nutrition, will remain in the name of the journal, and will now be accompanied by the name of a wide area of knowledge shared by professionals of different profiles. i.e. diabetes, inserted between the previous two terms. The name of both scientific societies, SEEN and SED, is therefore faithfully represented in the new name. The journal will provide the same contents of knowledge, but under its new name of Endocrinología, Diabetes y Nutrición. Endocrinología y Nutrición and Avances en Diabetología will become part of history as essential stages in the evolution of the respective scientific societies, which have converged to give way to the future. Welcome to the future of a publication that starts from the efforts and wishes of so many members who are or were part of these scientific endeavors and contributes to advances in this wide area of knowledge. Contributions from Spain and from the increasingly important Latin American area allow for predicting that in this new stage our journal may become the reference publication in endocrinology, diabetes, nutrition, and obesity in the Spanish-speaking world.