Medicina Clinica Practica

About Medicina Clinica Practica

Medicina Clínica Práctica — Journal Profile

Medicina Clínica Práctica (MCP) is a peer-reviewed, online, fully open access medical journal published in Spain by Elsevier España, the Spanish arm of Elsevier. Its single recorded identifier is the online ISSN 2603-9249 — the ISSN on this Journals World record, the ISSN under which the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists the title, the ISSN on Elsevier's own ScienceDirect journal pages, and the ISSN through which OpenAlex resolves the journal's source record. It is the open access companion title to Medicina Clínica, the long-established Spanish journal of internal medicine founded in 1943, and it was created to give that journal's community a practice-focused, freely readable home for clinical work. The journal publishes in Spanish and English, is aimed mainly at internists and other medical specialists, and states its purpose in one line: to publish articles with significant relevance in clinical practice.

Identity, family and history

To understand Medicina Clínica Práctica, start with its parent. Medicina Clínica, launched in 1943 and published fortnightly, is one of the defining journals of Spanish internal medicine, known among its readers for scientific and methodological rigour, topicality and an insistently practical focus. Its own journal pages direct authors plainly: manuscripts with a focus on clinical practice — original research, case reports and clinical images — can be submitted to its open access companion title, Medicina Clínica Práctica. MCP is that companion. It began publishing in 2018 — the first year of its coverage in the bibliographic record and the year of its earliest articles on ScienceDirect — as an online-only, peer-reviewed, open access journal, freed from the page budgets of a print fortnightly and able to publish the case-based, image-led, practice-oriented material that a flagship journal must constantly turn away.

The division of labour between the two titles is deliberate. The parent keeps the large original studies, the commissioned editorials, reviews and diagnosis-and-treatment articles through which it has taught Spanish internists for eighty years. The companion takes the wider flow of clinically useful work: the instructive case, the striking clinical image, the practice-centred review, and original research whose importance lies in its relevance to daily practice. Both titles are published by Elsevier España on ScienceDirect, both publish in Spanish and English, and both address the same community of internists and specialists — but only the companion is open access end to end, which makes it the version of the family's content that any clinician, anywhere, can read in full without a subscription.

Scope and subject coverage

Elsevier's aims-and-scope statement for the journal is short and should be quoted in substance: the journal is mainly focused on clinical practice and scientific communication, targeted to internists and other medical specialists; its aim is to publish articles with significant relevance in clinical practice; its sections include case reports and clinical images, as well as reviews centred on general practice, and original research articles. The journal's fuller Spanish-language description adds the educational thread that runs through everything it publishes: clinical cases and notes with real educational value for the knowledge of internal medicine, original articles, reviews written to illuminate daily medical practice, and images in medicine with a high educational and training value.

The DOAJ record's keywords — medical practice, internal medicine, clinical practice, clinical images — compress the same scope into catalogue form, and OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's indexed output shows what that scope produces in practice: concentrations in COVID-19 clinical research, sleep and related disorders, innovations in medical education, vasculitis and related conditions, and medical case reports. The COVID-19 weight is a matter of record in the journal's own publication curve: OpenAlex counts its output rising from 23 works in 2018 and 46 in 2019 to 74 in 2020 and a peak of 131 in 2021, when Spanish internal-medicine wards were at the centre of the pandemic response and a fast, open, practice-focused journal was exactly the instrument the moment required. Output since then has settled to 41 works in 2022, 50 in 2023, 70 in 2024 and 44 in 2025 on the same OpenAlex count — the profile of a journal that has found its steady state after an extraordinary surge.

Article types

The journal's guide for authors describes its article types in detail. Original articles present research on aetiology, physiopathology, pathology, epidemiology, clinical aspects, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment, with analytic designs — cross-sectional surveys, case-control studies, cohort studies and randomised trials — preferentially considered. Case reports and clinical notes carry cases whose value is educational: the rare presentation, the diagnostic trap, the management lesson. Clinical images are a section in their own right, reflecting the family's belief that a well-chosen image teaches faster than a page of prose. Reviews are oriented to daily practice rather than to exhaustive scholarship. That menu is the practical meaning of the journal's title: every section is judged by the same test, whether a practising clinician finishes the piece knowing something usable.

Metrics and indexing — what is verified

Each figure below is attributed to the source that publishes it, as checked for this profile in October 2026.

• CiteScore 0.7 — the figure displayed on Elsevier's own ScienceDirect journal pages and journal-insights page for Medicina Clínica Práctica.
• Indexing: Elsevier's insights page lists the journal's abstracting and indexing as Scopus and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Its DOAJ record was verified directly for this profile: Elsevier España as publisher in Spain, online ISSN 2603-9249, languages English and Spanish.
• OpenAlex: the source resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint (source S4210212127) records 513 works and 719 citations, with a summary h-index of 12 and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.09, as at checking time. The Journals World record's stored h-index of 12 agrees with this OpenAlex figure.
• Publishing timeline: Elsevier's insights page reports, from its own production data, 17 days from submission to first decision, 61 days from submission to decision after review, 40 days from submission to acceptance, and 29 days from acceptance to online publication. These are the publisher's reported averages at the time of checking, not guarantees for an individual manuscript.

No Journal Impact Factor is quoted for this journal in this profile, because none could be verified from an official Clarivate source during this research; the journal's verified citation standing is the CiteScore above. For a young companion title, the more meaningful signals are the ones on display here: Scopus coverage, a rising CiteScore base, a parent brand of eighty years' standing, and the publication volumes that show a community actually using the journal.

Open access, the APC and licensing

Medicina Clínica Práctica is an open access journal: everything it publishes is free to read on ScienceDirect. The cost of that openness sits with authors, through an article publishing charge. Elsevier's journal pages state the APC as USD 1,640 excluding taxes, and the journal's DOAJ record agrees, giving a maximum APC of USD 1,640 and pointing to the publisher's open-access-options page for the title; OpenAlex records a lower dollar figure of 1,340 in its own data, which reflects the price captured in its corpus at an earlier point — authors should always price a submission from the publisher's current page, not from any directory, this one included. DOAJ also records that the journal levies no other charges beyond the APC. Authors with Spanish or European funder support should note that open access publication in a DOAJ-listed journal is the standard route to compliance with funder open-access mandates, and that Elsevier operates institutional agreements under which the charge may be covered centrally — the publisher's open-access pages for the journal are the place to confirm eligibility before submitting.

How to submit

Submission is through Elsevier's online system for the journal, reached from its ScienceDirect journal pages, and the guide for authors on those pages is the controlling document for format, article-type requirements and declarations. Three practical points follow from the journal's own statements. First, choose the article type before writing: the journal's types are defined by purpose, and a case written as a research article, or research written as a note, will struggle in review. Second, write for practice: the stated test is significant relevance to clinical practice, and the introduction and discussion of any submission should make that relevance explicit for internists and specialists. Third, language is a genuine choice: the journal publishes in Spanish and English, and authors should write in the language in which they can be most precise, since the journal serves a Spanish-speaking home community and an international readership at once.

The companion-title model, and who this journal is for

Medicina Clínica Práctica is a clear example of the companion-title strategy by which established subscription journals now grow an open access wing: the parent contributes brand, editorial community and a flow of redirected manuscripts; the companion contributes openness, speed and room for article types the parent cannot hold. For readers, the benefit is simple — the clinical teaching material of one of Spain's great medical journals, readable by anyone. For authors, the fit is equally specific. This is the right home for work whose value is practical and educational: the case that changes how a ward round thinks, the image that teaches at a glance, the review that settles a daily question, the practice-based study from a Spanish or Latin American service that deserves an international, open audience. It is not the venue for work whose claims depend on the parent journal's flagship prestige, and its CiteScore should be weighed accordingly — as the standing of a young, practice-led companion, not of the 1943 title itself.

Similar journals

The natural comparison set is the family itself and its neighbours: Medicina Clínica, the parent title (CiteScore 2.8 and an Impact Factor displayed on its own ScienceDirect pages, per the publisher); Revista Clínica Española, the other historic Spanish internal-medicine journal; the European Journal of Internal Medicine for an English-language European internal-medicine audience; BMJ Case Reports for case-report authors comparing a dedicated cases venue with this journal's cases section; and Elsevier's other Spanish clinical titles on ScienceDirect for authors working in neighbouring specialties.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Medicina Clínica Práctica? Online ISSN 2603-9249. The journal is online-only and has no print ISSN in the records verified for this profile.

Who publishes Medicina Clínica Práctica? Elsevier España, in Spain, on the ScienceDirect platform.

Is it open access? Yes — fully open access, listed in DOAJ, with an article publishing charge stated by the publisher as USD 1,640 excluding taxes.

Is it the same journal as Medicina Clínica? No. It is the open access companion title to Medicina Clínica (founded 1943); the two are separate journals with separate ISSNs and separate metrics, sharing a publisher, a platform and a clinical community.

When did it start? Its coverage begins in 2018, the year of its earliest articles and of the start of its OpenAlex and directory records.

In what languages does it publish? Spanish and English, per Elsevier and DOAJ.

Where is it indexed? Scopus and DOAJ, per Elsevier's own journal-insights page.

What is its CiteScore? 0.7, as displayed on the journal's ScienceDirect pages at the time of checking.

Sources consulted for this profile, October 2026: Elsevier's ScienceDirect journal, guide-for-authors and journal-insights pages for Medicina Clínica Práctica and for Medicina Clínica; the DOAJ record for ISSN 2603-9249; the OpenAlex source resolved through its ISSN endpoint.

Reading the journal: what its pages actually contain

A journal's scope statement tells you what it wants; its publication record tells you what it gets. For Medicina Clínica Práctica the record, as OpenAlex indexes it, is instructive. The topic clusters — COVID-19 clinical studies first by a wide margin, then sleep disorders, medical education, vasculitis and case-report medicine — describe a journal that Spanish hospital physicians used, during the hardest years in living memory, to compare notes on a new disease in something close to real time, and that they continue to use for the ordinary, difficult material of internal medicine: the patient whose presentation crosses specialty lines, the iatrogenic problem, the diagnostic delay, the treatment that worked when the guideline ran out. The strong showing of medical-education topics fits the family's teaching mission, and the case-report cluster confirms that the cases section is not a vestige but one of the journal's working parts. An author wondering whether a manuscript belongs here can apply the test those clusters imply: would an internist in another hospital, reading this on a phone between wards, finish it better equipped for tomorrow's patients? If yes, the paper is in scope in the only sense the journal ultimately recognises.

Peer review and editorial standards

The journal is peer reviewed — Elsevier states this in the first line of its aims and scope — and it operates inside Elsevier's standard editorial framework for its medical journals, under which manuscripts are assessed for scientific soundness and clinical relevance, authors declare competing interests and funding, and research involving patients is expected to meet the ethical requirements set out in the journal's guide for authors. That guide, published on the journal's ScienceDirect pages, is the document that governs: it defines each article type, its structure and its limits, and authors should build their manuscripts to it rather than to the habits of another journal. The timelines Elsevier reports for the journal — a first decision in a reported average of 17 days and a decision after review in a reported average of 61 days — describe a review process run at the pace clinical material needs: fast enough that a practice-relevant finding is still current when it appears, deliberate enough for genuine external review.

A note on language and audience

Bilingual journals ask authors a real question, and this journal's two languages are not interchangeable in effect. A paper in Spanish speaks directly to the journal's home community — the internists of Spain and Latin America who form the historic readership of the Medicina Clínica family — and to the clinicians most likely to apply a Spanish practice study unchanged. A paper in English trades some of that immediacy for reach: it becomes findable and citable by the international internal-medicine community and by systematic reviewers who search in English. The journal accepts both, per Elsevier and its DOAJ record, and the choice should be made deliberately, on the audience the work is for, rather than by default. Either way, the bilingual abstract culture of Spanish medical publishing applies: a well-made abstract in the other language is the cheapest visibility an author can buy.

Choosing between the companion and the parent

Because the two titles share a name, a publisher and a community, authors regularly have to choose between them, and the journals themselves state the basis of the choice. Medicina Clínica's own pages say that manuscripts with a focus on clinical practice — original research, case reports and clinical images — can be submitted to the companion. Read in reverse, that is the companion's charter: if the paper's centre of gravity is practice, education and the instructive case, it belongs to Medicina Clínica Práctica, with open access as a further argument when funders or institutions require it. If the paper is a large study aiming at the flagship's fortnightly readership and citation standing, it belongs to the parent, accepting subscription access as the price. Editors move manuscripts between related titles in this family, as in other publisher families, but an author who aims at the right title first saves a full review cycle.

How often does it publish? As an online-only open access journal it publishes articles continuously on ScienceDirect as they are accepted and produced; the publisher's reported average from acceptance to online publication is 29 days.

Does publishing there help with funder open-access mandates? The journal is fully open access and DOAJ-listed, which is the combination funder mandates ordinarily require; authors should still confirm the licence terms and any institutional agreement on the publisher's open-access page for the journal before submitting, since those arrangements change over time.