The Editorial Board of the Nefrología journal has recently received consultations from Spanish nephrology colleagues as to whether the articles published in Nefrología should be classified as national or international publications. The question arises from the need to respond to the «Resolution of 30 July 2014 from the Directorate-General for Human Resources in which instructions are given on criteria for appointment of temporary staff at health centres of the Madrid Health Service». Specifically, in Section 3.1.3, referring to Assessment, a score determined by «… articles in the speciality, published in specialised publications included in national or international indices» is established.

In the first place, given the present globalisation of the world and the current possibilities of instantaneous communication to any place on Earth, it is surprising that the question is raised as to whether the Nefrología journal can be considered an international journal for assessing competitive examinations. Evidently, the articles in the Nefrología journal are international. Current media outlets know no frontiers; the only limitation is the ability to read what is written. For material that is written in Spanish and in English, as in Nefrología, there are scarcely any boundaries.

Regardless of the type of scaling system that the Administration considers most appropriate and fair, what is most important to us, the editorial board of an international scientific journal, is the dissemination of new findings and that our readers cite our work. This is an age in which biomedical journals attempt to use impact factors to adequately (although not exactly) appraise the scientific quality of publications. In addition to the well-known JCR Impact Factor, there are several others, such as the Scimago Journal & Country Rank and Google Scholar Metrics.

As we realize that no modifications of the scoring system for the various competitive examinations are foreseen in the near future, the Nefrología Editorial Board wishes to indicate why its journal publications are international:

• 1.

  The Nefrología journal is included, as is any international journal, in the PUBMED, THOMSON and SCOPUS international indices.

• 2.

  The entire contents of Nefrología are published in English, which guarantees its international dissemination through the previously-mentioned databases.

• 3.

  The Nefrología journal accepts texts from any country in the world, written either in English or in Spanish. Last year, 22% of the original articles published in Nefrología were from other countries.

• 4.

  The contents of Nefrología are peer reviewed, with a rejection rate of 44.1% last year. In 2013, our 2013 Impact Factor was 1.442, which is higher than that of many other international journals in the speciality, such as Clinical Nephrology, Scandinavian Journal of Urology and Nephrology, Renal Failure and Hemodialysis International, among others.

• 5.

  The website revistanefrologia.com, which includes the entire contents of Nefrología, tallies a monthly average of 80,000 hits (visits); of these, only 20.1% come from Spain. PUBMED is the source for 33% of its hits.

For all these reasons, the Editorial Board of Nefrología sustains that the Nefrología journal does not differ from other international journals in our speciality. Consequently, the articles appearing in Nefrología have been selected for publication in an international journal and should be considered as such when quantifying the scientific merit of a curriculum vitae.