REC: CardioClinics

About REC: CardioClinics

About REC: CardioClinics

REC: CardioClinics is a quarterly scientific journal of clinical cardiology, published in Spain as an official journal of the Spanish Society of Cardiology (Sociedad Española de Cardiología, SEC). It belongs to REC Publications, the society's journal family built around Revista Española de Cardiología, and it was created to give clinical cardiovascular medicine — the diagnosis, prevention and management of patients with cardiovascular disease — a dedicated home alongside the family's flagship research journal and its interventional-cardiology title. The journal is published with Elsevier, is hosted on ScienceDirect, and maintains its own journal site at reccardioclinics.org, where its guide for authors, current issue and article archive are presented.

The journal's identifiers are ISSN 2605-1532 and e-ISSN 2605-1575, as given in its ScienceDirect guide for authors and in the header of its own journal site. One wrinkle should be recorded for accuracy: the REC Publications family page lists the same two numbers with the print and electronic labels reversed. The numbers themselves are not in dispute — every source agrees on the pair — and this profile follows the labelling used by the journal's own guide for authors and journal site. Articles are published in the language in which they are received, Spanish or English, in the journal's digital edition, which makes the title genuinely bilingual in practice: a Spanish cardiologist can publish in Spanish and reach the society's membership, while English-language papers address the wider international readership that ScienceDirect provides.

Origins Within the REC Publications Family

To understand REC: CardioClinics, start with the family. REC Publications is the publishing house identity of the Spanish Society of Cardiology, and its journals follow a double-blind peer-review system, work to high standards of quality and ethics, and belong to the ESC Editors' Network, the network of cardiology journal editors associated with the European Society of Cardiology. The family's senior title, Revista Española de Cardiología, has been dedicated to clinical and translational cardiology research since 1947 and appears monthly in a fully bilingual edition. Its younger companions divide the modern field between them: REC: Interventional Cardiology serves the interventional community as the official publication of the society's Interventional Cardiology Association, and REC: CardioClinics, launched with its first volume in 2019, serves clinical cardiology in the broad sense.

The launch logic is visible in the journal's own description of its editorial line. REC: CardioClinics addresses novel aspects of cardiovascular clinical care and new approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of patients, with special interest in thematic areas that clinical trials do not cover well — the journal names cardiac tumour disease, pericardial disease, cardiovascular problems associated with pregnancy, and sports cardiology as examples. That is a considered niche: trial-excluded populations and less common clinical problems are exactly where practising cardiologists most need published experience, and a society journal with a clinical remit is the natural place to collect it. OpenAlex, which indexes the title as source S4210182158, records publications from 2019 onward with no gap to the present, and Crossref holds 808 registered DOIs under the journal's ISSN, a backfile consistent with a quarterly that has run continuously since its launch.

Aims and Scope

The guide for authors defines the journal as an international, quarterly, scientific journal that covers the study, prevention and management of clinical cardiovascular medicine. Its subject territory is the whole of clinical cardiology as practised with patients: heart failure, coronary disease, arrhythmias, valvular and myocardial disease, cardiovascular prevention and risk, imaging-informed diagnosis, and the special clinical situations the journal singles out, such as cardio-oncology problems including cardiac tumours, pericardial disease, pregnancy in women with cardiovascular disease, and the cardiology of athletes. OpenAlex's topic classification for the source tells the same story from the citation side, placing the journal's centre of gravity in heart-failure treatment and management, cardiology and cardiovascular medicine, and acute myocardial infarction research.

The article types complete the picture of the scope. The journal publishes original articles on clinical research, scientific letters, images in cardiology, letters to the Editor, editorials, reviews of current subjects and special articles. That mixture — full original studies alongside image-driven teaching pieces and short scientific correspondence — is the standard repertoire of a clinical society journal, and it distinguishes REC: CardioClinics from the family's flagship: where Revista Española de Cardiología carries the society's largest research output, CardioClinics is weighted toward the clinical encounter, the instructive case image and the focused review.

Editorial Standards and Peer Review

The journal adheres to the norms of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and to the directives of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the Council of Science Editors, and its review model is double anonymised: both authors and reviewers are anonymous to one another. Original articles, review articles, scientific letters and images in cardiology that the editorial team judges to fit the journal's editorial line are assessed by external peer reviewers designated by the editors, and the team may also send items from the remaining categories for review when it considers that appropriate. Decisions are communicated by email. Manuscripts must be original, must not have been published beforehand, and must not be under review at any other publication — the standard exclusivity the guide states plainly.

One publisher-reported figure gives authors a useful sense of the journal's tempo: the journal's page on its publisher's site reports a median time to first decision of four days. That number, which the publisher presents as a median across submissions, most plausibly reflects rapid editorial triage — a first decision that includes desk decisions — rather than a full external review completed in four days, and authors should read it in that light. It does, however, signal an editorial office that aims not to leave manuscripts waiting for an initial response.

Metrics and Standing

REC: CardioClinics is a young journal, and its metrics are those of a title still building its citation base. The journal's own site, reporting Scopus-derived measures, gives a CiteScore 2025 of 0.7, an SJR 2025 of 0.140 and a SNIP 2025 of 0.159. OpenAlex counts 807 works and 664 citations for the title, with an h-index of 9, an i10-index of 8 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.339. The JournalsWorld record, built from Scopus-derived data, listed an h-index of 8 and coverage from 2019, figures consistent with the OpenAlex picture at an earlier snapshot. The REC Publications family page does not quote a Journal Citation Reports impact factor for this title (it does for the flagship), and none is claimed here: readers who need the journal's current Web of Science status should verify it in Journal Citation Reports directly rather than rely on aggregator estimates.

Standing, for a society journal of this kind, is not only a citation question. REC: CardioClinics is the official clinical title of a major national cardiology society, it is published by Elsevier on the platform where most of its readers already work, it is indexed in Scopus, and it speaks to its community in that community's own language as well as in English. For a Spanish or Latin American clinician deciding where a clinically useful paper will actually be read by peers, those are material advantages that a CiteScore alone does not capture.

Indexing and Access

The guide for authors states that the journal is indexed on ScienceDirect, Scopus, Google Scholar and Latindex; the REC Publications family page also lists Embase and Dialnet among its indexing services. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by both ISSNs returned no listing at the time of checking, so the journal should not be described as DOAJ-indexed. Access is through Elsevier's ScienceDirect arrangements: the Elsevier shop offers the title by institutional subscription on ScienceDirect (one volume, four issues a year), and individual articles are presented through the journal's own site as well as the ScienceDirect platform. The guide for authors refers readers to the journal's open access policy for the open-access route, but no specific article processing charge figure could be verified from the sources consulted for this profile, and authors who need a priced open-access option for funder compliance should confirm the current figure with the publisher before submitting rather than rely on any third-party listing.

The REC Family and Related Titles

Authors sometimes wonder how the three REC titles divide submissions, and the family's own descriptions answer the question cleanly. Revista Española de Cardiología (ISSN 0300-8932, e-ISSN 1579-2242) is the monthly, fully bilingual flagship for clinical and translational research, indexed in Journal Citation Reports and the Science Citation Index Expanded, MEDLINE and Scopus among others. REC: Interventional Cardiology is the quarterly bilingual title of the society's Interventional Cardiology Association, devoted to interventional practice. REC: CardioClinics is the quarterly clinical title profiled here. The three are companion journals under one society and one publishing family, with separate ISSNs, separate editorial lines and separate audiences; they are not editions or duplicates of one another, and a manuscript belongs in the one whose remit it fits — interventional technique to the interventional title, broad clinical care and its less-charted corners to CardioClinics, and the society's largest-scale research to the flagship. REC Publications also issues special issues and monographic supplements annually across the family.

Information for Authors

Submissions are made online through the journal's submission system, linked from its official site. Before submitting, authors should work through the guide for authors in its current form: it sets out the article categories described above, the double anonymised review process, and the requirement that work be original and not under consideration elsewhere. Manuscripts may be written in Spanish or English and will be published in the language received, so authors should submit in the language in which they write best and in which their intended readers will find the paper. Authors should declare the article type clearly, follow the ICMJE norms the journal adheres to, and be ready for external review of original articles, reviews, scientific letters and images in cardiology. Because the journal's editorial line favours clinical research with patients and thematic areas underserved by trials, authors strengthen a submission by making its clinical payoff explicit — what a practising cardiologist will do differently, or understand better, after reading it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of REC: CardioClinics? ISSN 2605-1532 and e-ISSN 2605-1575, per the journal's guide for authors and journal site. The REC Publications family page prints the same pair with the print/electronic labels reversed; the numbers themselves are consistent across sources.

Who publishes REC: CardioClinics? It is an official journal of the Spanish Society of Cardiology, within REC Publications, and is published with Elsevier on ScienceDirect. The JournalsWorld stored record previously showed a numeric code in the publisher field; the publisher of record is Elsevier, for the society.

Is REC: CardioClinics peer-reviewed? Yes — it follows a double anonymised external peer-review model and adheres to ICMJE, COPE and Council of Science Editors guidance.

When did it start? Its first volume appeared in 2019; OpenAlex records continuous publication from 2019 to the present.

What are its metrics? The journal reports CiteScore 2025 of 0.7, SJR 2025 of 0.140 and SNIP 2025 of 0.159 (Scopus-derived, publisher-presented). OpenAlex counts 807 works, 664 citations and an h-index of 9.

In which languages does it publish? Spanish and English; articles appear in the language in which they are received.

Is it the same as Revista Española de Cardiología? No. That is the family's senior flagship journal, a separate title with its own ISSNs; REC: CardioClinics is the family's quarterly clinical journal, launched in 2019.

Profile sources: the journal's guide for authors and journal site (reccardioclinics.org) and its ScienceDirect journal pages; the REC Publications family page (recintervcardiol.org); Elsevier shop product page for ISSN 2605-1532; Crossref journal record for ISSN 2605-1532; OpenAlex source S4210182158; DOAJ search API (no listing found for either ISSN). Metric figures are attributed to their presenting sources in the text and were checked in October 2026.

The Journal's Clinical Territory in Practice

The scope statement's emphasis on areas that clinical trials cover poorly is the journal's most distinctive editorial commitment, and it deserves expansion, because it tells authors exactly what this journal wants that its sister titles may not. Cardiac tumour disease is rare, largely managed from case experience and small series, and unlikely ever to be the subject of large randomised trials; pericardial disease is similarly heterogeneous; cardiovascular problems in pregnancy sit at the junction of cardiology and obstetrics, where trial evidence is thin for ethical as well as practical reasons; and sports cardiology must constantly translate population guidance to individual athletes. A journal that names these areas in its own description is inviting precisely the submissions — case series, imaging studies, focused reviews, scientific letters reporting instructive single cases — that document how such patients are actually managed. Its "images in cardiology" category reinforces the invitation: in a discipline where echocardiography, cardiac magnetic resonance, computed tomography and angiography drive decisions, a well-chosen image with a tight clinical message is a recognised unit of teaching, and the journal gives it a peer-reviewed home.

The rest of the clinical territory is the mainstream of the discipline, handled with the same patient-centred orientation: heart failure management, acute coronary syndromes and myocardial infarction, arrhythmia care, valvular disease, prevention and risk-factor control. OpenAlex's topic profile for the journal — heart-failure treatment and management at its centre, with acute myocardial infarction research prominent — confirms that the published record matches the stated line. For readers, the result is a journal that can be read the way a clinician works: a mixture of original clinical research, short scientific correspondence that reports a finding quickly, images that teach, and reviews that bring a current subject into focus, issued four times a year in Spanish or English as the manuscripts arrive.

Reading the Journal's Numbers Honestly

A word on interpreting this journal's metrics, because young society journals are routinely misjudged by them. A CiteScore of 0.7 and an h-index in single figures look small beside the flagship of the same family, Revista Española de Cardiología, whose 2025 impact factor the family page gives as 4.2 — but the comparison is between different instruments built for different jobs. The flagship, founded in 1947, publishes monthly, fully bilingually, across the whole of cardiology research, and has accumulated its citation position over decades. REC: CardioClinics began in 2019, publishes quarterly, and deliberately covers clinical ground — pericardial disease, pregnancy, sports cardiology, cardiac tumours — where the citing community is smaller and the value of a paper lies in guiding a decision rather than in founding a research line. Citation averages punish exactly that kind of usefulness. The fairer indicators of the journal's health are the ones this profile can verify: continuous quarterly publication since 2019, more than eight hundred works in OpenAlex's count with citations already accumulating (664 at checking), Scopus indexing, a functioning double-anonymised review system under ICMJE and COPE norms, and the institutional backing of the Spanish Society of Cardiology within a journal family whose members belong to the ESC Editors' Network. Authors weighing a submission should weigh those facts alongside the metrics, and editors assessing the journal for an institutional list should do the same.

For librarians, the essential record is compact: title REC: CardioClinics; society owner, the Spanish Society of Cardiology; publisher, Elsevier; ISSN pair 2605-1532 and 2605-1575 (with the labelling discrepancy between the journal's own pages and the family page noted above); quarterly; volumes from 2019; languages Spanish and English; platforms ScienceDirect and reccardioclinics.org. Cited references to the journal in other works may shorten the title in various ways, but the ISSN pair identifies it unambiguously.