Metas de Enfermeria

About Metas de Enfermeria

Metas de Enfermería — Journal Profile

Metas de Enfermería — in English, “Goals of Nursing” — is a Spanish-language, generalist scientific journal for nurses, published in Spain through the Enfermería21 portal of the DAE publishing group. Its bibliometric biography is unusually well documented for a professional journal, because Spanish nursing scholars have studied it directly: an analysis in Index de Enfermería (2005, volume 14, issues 48–49, pages 78–82) examined the journal's scientific production “since it was first released in the market (1998)”, describing it as a periodical of scientific and generalist character, of interest to nurses working in teaching, in care, in research and in management, and recording a circulation of 17,000 copies certified by Spain's Oficina para la Justificación de la Difusión (OJD) at that time. That combination — a commercial professional publisher, a generalist remit across the whole nursing profession, and a readership counted in tens of thousands in its early years — is the right frame for understanding this journal. It is not a university quarterly and not a narrow research specialty title; it is the Spanish nursing profession's own working journal, in Spanish, for practitioners as much as for academics.

The identifier anchoring this profile is the print ISSN 1138-7262, recorded on this JournalsWorld record. Resolving that ISSN through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint returns one source, S4306519812, named “Metas de Enfermería”, listing two ISSNs — 1138-7262 and a second number, 2660-986X — and giving the journal's homepage as the Enfermería21 page for the journal, enfermeria21.com/revistas/metas. The second number is reported here exactly as OpenAlex returns it, attributed to OpenAlex; authors citing the journal should use the ISSN printed on the issue or article they are citing, and anyone updating this record should verify 2660-986X against the ISSN Portal before treating it as the journal's electronic ISSN. The journal's articles carry DOIs in a consistent modern form — an Enfermería21 article page, for example, shows a 2020 article cited as Metas Enferm 23(7):69-73 with a DOI beginning 10.35667/MetasEnf — which tells readers both that the journal is at volume 23 by 2020, consistent with a 1998 start, and that its recent content is DOI-registered and citable in the normal international way.

Quick Facts

History and Identity

The journal entered the Spanish editorial market in 1998, on the evidence of the 2005 bibliometric study, which set out to analyse everything it had published from that launch to the time of writing — the first five years, 1998–2002, in its detailed counts. The study's findings give a rare, evidence-based portrait of a young professional journal finding its feet. It published an average of 9.2 articles per issue (standard deviation 1.02), with output trending upward; 30 per cent of its authors came from the hospital setting; the autonomous region producing the most work was Madrid, with 44.6 per cent; 46.2 per cent of articles were single-authored, and the overall collaboration index was 2.37 authors per paper, rising steadily across the five years. The most-written-about area of knowledge was medical-surgical nursing, at 30.3 per cent of articles, and 21.6 per cent were research articles — a share that, the authors noted, increased significantly over the period. Their conclusion was that the growth in articles, especially research papers, and the rising collaboration rate showed a journal of good and steadily improving quality in its first five years.

That trajectory — from practice writing towards a larger research share, from single authors towards teams — mirrors the development of Spanish nursing itself in those decades, as university nursing education and nursing research expanded in Spain. A generalist title that began as the profession's magazine of record became, volume by volume, a place where Spanish nurses published studies as well as experience. The OJD circulation figure of 17,000 copies recorded in the same study belongs to that era and should not be quoted as a current figure; it is evidence about the journal's reach in its early years, when print circulation was the measure that mattered, before the Enfermería21 portal became the journal's front door.

The identity point for directory users is precision about what this journal is not. It is not Revista ROL de Enfermería, the older Barcelona nursing journal (ISSN 0210-5020), which appeared alongside this record in twin checks and is a separate title with its own long history. It is not Enfermería Clínica, the Elsevier Spanish nursing journal, and it is not any of the university-published Spanish nursing titles such as Enfermería Global (Universidad de Murcia). The title Metas de Enfermería, the DAE and Enfermería21 imprint, and ISSN 1138-7262 together identify this journal uniquely, and its cited short form, Metas Enferm, is the abbreviation under which its articles appear in reference lists.

Publisher and Platform

The publisher behind Enfermería21 is DAE, S.L. — Difusión Avances de Enfermería — within Grupo Paradigma, based at Riba-roja de Túria, Valencia, as the legal notice on the Enfermería21 journal page states, giving the journal's contact address through the group's domains. Enfermería21 is the group's nursing portal: a combined home for its journals, books, courses and professional content, describing itself in its page metadata as “Todo para enfermería” — everything for nursing. For an author, that platform context matters in practical ways. The journal reaches its readers as part of a larger professional ecosystem that Spanish nurses already use for training and reference, rather than as a standalone title a reader must discover alone; and its article pages present the modern apparatus of citation — how-to-cite information, authors and affiliations, contact address, abstracts, keywords and bibliography — in both Spanish and, on the pages sampled, an English article view.

The worked example on the portal is instructive. A September 2020 article by Carmen Sarabia-Cobo and the IDIVAL nursing research group, presenting an accredited emerging research group at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Valdecilla, is shown with its full citation — journal, year, volume 23, issue 7, pages 69–73 — its DOI, its authors' positions, a structured abstract in English describing accreditation in 2017, growth to 17 members and eight research lines by January 2020, and publication output, and its keywords: nursing, chronic disease, patient safety, students, nursing care. A group-profile article of that kind is a characteristically Metas contribution: professionally useful, institutionally grounded, and published where the Spanish nursing community will actually see it.

Scope and Subjects

The 2005 study's one-sentence scope remains the best short description in print: a scientific periodical of generalist character, able to interest nurses who work in teaching institutions, in care delivery, in research and in administration. Within that generalist remit, its historical subject centre of gravity was medical-surgical nursing — nearly a third of early articles — with research papers the next largest identifiable block and rising. Nothing in the journal's later presentation narrows that remit: the Enfermería21 example above is about research-group organisation; the keyword set spans chronic disease, patient safety and nursing students. The journal is, in short, a whole-profession title.

OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's indexed corpus, checked for this profile, maps the same breadth in modern terms. Its largest topic clusters for source S4306519812 were nursing education and management (411 works in that topic assignment), nursing care and research (227), nursing diagnosis and documentation (177), palliative and oncologic care (174), nursing roles and practices (155) and healthcare education and workforce issues (141). Topic assignments in OpenAlex are algorithmic and a single work can inform the picture in more than one way, so these counts should be read as a shape, not as audited subject statistics — but the shape is unmistakable: education, care delivery, documentation, end-of-life care, professional roles and workforce questions are the journal's recurring concerns, which is exactly the agenda of a practising profession's generalist journal.

For authors, the practical reading of this scope is that a manuscript needs a nursing-profession audience, not merely a nursing topic. A well-conducted ward study, an education innovation with honest evaluation, a documentation or safety intervention, a workforce or management analysis, or a careful review that changes what a practising nurse does on Monday morning — all of these are native to this journal. A highly technical paper whose natural readers are a different profession, or a study so local that no nurse outside one institution could use it, will struggle to justify its place; the early bibliometric record shows a journal that has always balanced the local and the transferable, with Madrid's large share of early authors reflecting where Spanish nursing research was concentrated rather than any editorial restriction on who may write.

Editorial Information and How the Journal Works

Editorial information for this title is held on the Enfermería21 platform, and the honest position — stated here because this profile does not invent what it could not fetch — is that the current editor's name, the full editorial board list, the detailed author norms and any peer-review timetable are matters for the journal's pages on enfermeria21.com at the time an author is preparing a submission, and they could not be verified in full from the pages retrieved for this profile. What can be verified is the working apparatus visible on every article page: a defined citation form, DOI registration, author position and contact information, abstracts and keywords, and a bibliography — the visible signs of a professionally edited journal operating normal scholarly conventions. Authors should take the journal's current norms for authors from Enfermería21 itself, in Spanish, and follow them literally, including its citation style, rather than relying on any summary, this one included.

Two process points can be made responsibly. First, the language: this is a Spanish journal for a Spanish-reading profession, and manuscripts should be prepared in Spanish to the journal's norms; the English elements on article pages serve indexing and international readers, not authors hoping to submit in English — any author unsure on this point should confirm it with the editorial office before preparing a manuscript, through the contact routes on the journal page. Second, fit: a generalist professional journal lives or dies on readability for busy practitioners, so the qualities the journal's own history rewards — clear questions, honest methods, findings a nurse can use — are the qualities to bring. Review arrangements, decision times and any charges are not stated in this profile beyond what the fees section records, because they could not be verified from a fetched source; the editorial office's current statement on Enfermería21 is the authority.

Metrics — Read With Attribution

OpenAlex, checked for this profile through its ISSN endpoint on ISSN 1138-7262, resolves the journal to source S4306519812 and records 2,107 works, 60 of them open-access works, cited 1,332 times in total, with summary statistics of an h-index of 10, an i10-index of 10 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.1. It lists the journal's first publication year in its data as 1962 and its last as 2024. The 1962 date must not be read as a founding date: the documented market launch is 1998, on the 2005 bibliometric study, and OpenAlex's early year reflects older or conflated records in its corpus — a known hazard when a database aggregates catalogues mechanically. The works and citation totals, by contrast, are a plausible order of magnitude for a journal publishing roughly nine to ten articles an issue over more than two decades, and they are the figures to cite, attributed to OpenAlex and to the checking date, if a single database picture is needed.

Other numbers in circulation need the same care. The JournalsWorld import underlying this record recorded an h-index of 4, drawn from SCImago data at import time. That is not the same quantity as OpenAlex's h-index of 10: the databases index different corpora — SCImago works from Scopus, whose coverage of Spanish-language professional nursing content is partial, while OpenAlex aggregates more widely — and they extract at different dates. A Spanish-language professional journal is precisely the kind of title for which global databases undercount real influence: its readers are practitioners who use its guidance without necessarily publishing citing papers of their own. No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is claimed for this title in this profile, and no SCImago SJR value is stated, because neither could be verified from a fetched source at checking time; authors who need those figures for an institutional file should take them from the current SCImago record for ISSN 1138-7262 and name the source and year.

The circulation evidence deserves its own sentence, because for this journal type it is a metric that matters. The OJD-certified circulation of 17,000 copies recorded by the 2005 study is a historical figure, not a current one — this profile repeats it only with its date attached — but it establishes the scale the journal reached in print, and the modern Enfermería21 platform, with DOI-registered articles and structured article pages, is the present-day counterpart of that reach.

Indexing and Discovery

The journal's discovery routes that can be stated from fetched sources are these: it is indexed in OpenAlex as source S4306519812, which also records it as listed in Latindex, in the Polish ministerial list and in the Russian white list aggregations OpenAlex tracks; its articles are DOI-registered and surfaced through the Enfermería21 portal with full citation metadata; and its early scholarly footprint is documented in the Cuiden-centred world of Spanish nursing bibliography, the milieu of the Index de Enfermería study that analysed it. Spanish nursing scholarship is served by specialist bibliographic tools — Cuiden and the Fundación Index ecosystem — and any researcher doing a serious search of Spanish nursing literature should work through those tools and Dialnet-style Spanish cataloguing as well as the global databases, because coverage of titles like this one is materially better there.

A Directory of Open Access Journals claim is not made in this profile. OpenAlex records the journal as not open access in its model — 60 open works among 2,107 — which fits a subscription professional journal whose portal shows some content openly; and in any event the DOAJ search API returned an error throughout the checking period for this batch, so no DOAJ statement, positive or negative, is made here. The practical guidance for readers is simple: find this journal through Enfermería21, through its ISSN in library catalogues, and through Spanish nursing bibliography, and cite it by its DOI where an article has one.

Fees, Access and Submitting

On money, this profile reports only what sources support. The journal is a commercial professional title from DAE and Grupo Paradigma, sold into the Spanish nursing market in print historically and presented now through the Enfermería21 platform; the early OJD circulation shows a paying professional readership. An article processing charge, a submission fee and any page or colour charges could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and none is asserted here — in either direction. Authors should confirm the current position, in writing, with the editorial office before submitting, and should be wary of any third-party page that states a fee for this journal without pointing to the publisher's own current norms; fee information for professional subscription journals is a frequent point of error in directories.

Submission itself runs through the publisher: prepare the manuscript in Spanish, to the norms for authors published on Enfermería21 for Metas de Enfermería; give authors' positions and a contact address in the form the article pages display; provide an abstract and keywords; and expect the citation of accepted work in the journal's established form — Metas Enferm, year, volume, issue, pages, DOI. Because this profile could not verify the journal's current submission portal mechanics, review model or decision times from a fetched page, those points are deliberately left to the journal's own current instructions, which are the only version an author should act on. What can be said from the journal's record is what kind of work succeeds here: studies and professional papers written for the whole nursing profession, from care, teaching, research or management, with methods honest enough to survive professional scrutiny and findings clear enough to be used.

Similar Journals and How to Choose

Within Spain, the nearest relatives are the other generalist and clinical nursing titles a Spanish nurse actually reads. Revista ROL de Enfermería (ISSN 0210-5020), founded in Barcelona in 1978, is the elder of the profession's journals and the closest in spirit — professional, generalist, practice-facing — and authors choosing between ROL and Metas are choosing between two established professional readerships with overlapping habits. Enfermería Clínica offers a more clinically and research-weighted Elsevier platform. Index de Enfermería is the bibliographic and documentary conscience of Spanish nursing — the journal that published the study of Metas itself — and suits documentary, historical and bibliometric work. University open-access titles such as Enfermería Global suit authors who need an open-access licence and a university-journal process. International English-language nursing journals suit work whose audience is genuinely global; they are not substitutes for reaching Spanish practitioners in Spanish.

The deciding question is readership and language. If the finding should change how nurses in Spain practise, teach, document or organise care, Metas de Enfermería puts it in front of that profession, in its own language, in a journal that has served it since 1998 and whose own bibliometric record shows a steady maturing from practice writing towards team-based research. If the work's contribution is primarily to international research literature, a Scopus- or Web of Science-centred English title will serve the author's citation needs better. Many Spanish research groups, sensibly, do both across a programme of work: the international paper for the science, the Metas paper for the profession.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Metas de Enfermería? A Spanish-language, generalist scientific and professional journal for nurses, published in Spain by DAE through the Enfermería21 platform of Grupo Paradigma, and published since 1998.

What is its ISSN? The print ISSN is 1138-7262. OpenAlex lists a second ISSN, 2660-986X, for the same source (S4306519812); verify its role in the ISSN Portal before citing it as the electronic ISSN.

Is it peer reviewed? It operates as a scientific journal with professional editorial conventions — structured abstracts, keywords, DOIs and citation norms visible on its article pages. Its detailed review model and timetable could not be verified from the pages fetched for this profile, so authors should confirm them in the journal's current norms on Enfermería21.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex at checking time recorded 2,107 works, 1,332 citations, an h-index of 10 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.1 for source S4306519812. The older SCImago-derived h-index recorded in this directory's import was 4. The two figures come from different databases and dates and are not interchangeable.

Does it charge authors? No fee could be verified from the sources checked, and none is claimed here in either direction. Confirm the current position with the editorial office before submitting, and distrust third-party fee claims that do not cite the publisher.

In what language should I submit? The journal is a Spanish-language title for the Spanish profession; prepare work in Spanish to the journal's norms, and confirm any language question with the editorial office in advance.

How is it cited? In the short form Metas Enferm, with year, volume, issue and pages, and DOI where assigned — for example, Metas Enferm 2020; 23(7):69-73, DOI 10.35667/MetasEnf.2020.23.1003081628, as shown on Enfermería21.

Reading This Journal Well

Read Metas de Enfermería as the Spanish nursing profession's working journal: generalist on purpose, practical in intent, and increasingly research-bearing as Spanish nursing itself has become a research profession. Its best evidence is its own record — a documented 1998 launch, an OJD-counted print readership in the tens of thousands in its early years, a first-five-years bibliometric portrait of rising output, rising collaboration and a rising research share, and a current platform that registers DOIs and presents articles to international citation standards. Judge it by whether Spanish nurses read it and use it, verify its current editorial details on Enfermería21 before submitting, and attribute every metric attached to it to the database and date that produced it.