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From 1989 to 1998, I was coeditor of the Revista de Investigación Clínica, with Ruben Lisker as Editor-in-Chief. I guess I miss him as much as the activity that coediting required. My devotion for editing is rooted in the idea that medical research in Mexico is like a small fragile flower which needs careful nurturing, and that editors have an important role in this task. Rubén Lisker agreed with never rejecting papers on subjective likes or dislikes of our reviewers but mainly on whether the study’s conclusion was or was not supported by the results. The current option of being able to recuse specific reviewers offered in many journals, may be useful for experienced researchers who know their academic “enemies,” but not for inexperienced researchers to whom an unmerited rejection could lead to disappointment and eventually to drop out from research. This is where editors can help in nurturing the small fragile flower of research.
When I was asked to comment on the best papers published during my years as coeditor, I was confronted with the conflict of interest of evaluating texts in which I had actively participated in producing. To me, the only participants without a conflict of interest in scientific publications are the readers of such publications. The very little we knew about them was through the Letters to the Editor, and as you, the reader of this article may guess, these Letters are more likely to be on articles that readers do not like than on those they do like. Luckily, I could find information on our readers in the web but only for the last 6 years of my tenure as coeditor.
THE LATINDEX DATA BASE
The Latindex platform covers our on-line publications for a 26-year lapse, starting in 1993 and ending in 2018. It provides the number of on-line visits for every article, including non-original articles such as letters and memorials1. The number of on-line visits to each article of our journal is used by Latindex to identify the ten most read articles in the database. The top ten ranged from 18,626 to 35,691 visits (last accessed in May 2021). In addition, it uses a number of favorable commentaries of readers to list a top-ten of best rated articles.
OUR READERS 1993-1998
Table 1 shows the yearly number of articles and on-line visits to the 1993-1998 articles published in our journal. The total in table 1 is quite impressive as our 1993-1998 articles have been visited by over one million readers. As a result, three of the ten most read articles in the period 1993-2018, including the record-holder, were published in the period from 1993 to 1998: As seen in table 2, their titles seem somewhat unattractive but proved to be most attractive to our readers. The 1998 volume was outstanding in that it nearly reached 100 articles and a quarter of a million visits and, in addition, seven of the top ten articles ranked by readers were published in the 1998 volume. It was a good farewell for Ruben Lisker after 30 years as Editor-in-Chief of our journal.
