OBJECTIVES Citations are widely used as a measure of research quality. Self-citation when appropriate may give visibility to an author's work, but may also artificially influence journal rankings. Journal self-citation in Latin America has not been addressed; the objective of this study was to describe self-citation patterns along with other indicators —self-citing rate (SCR), journal total citations, citations per document and total documents— in Latin American medical journals, and to analyze their possible correlation with the Impact factor (IF) and the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).

METHODS We retrieved data from 1999 to 2017 from each Latin American medical journal and extracted the following information: total citations, self-citations (SC), journal total references and total documents; IF and SJR were retrieved from World of Science and SCImago database, respectively.

RESULTS Scimago has 257 indexed Latin American journals between 1999 and 2017, while WoS has 68. We only included in the analysis those journals with at least 50 published documents and that were ranked in Scimago for a minimum of 4 years with at least 4 published documents per year. From 1999 to 2017 there is a significant increase in SJR and IF, total number of citations, total number of documents, total citations per document and SCR of Latin American medical journals, while the self-cited rate has had a significant decrease. However, self-citation practices have decreased since 2012. We found an overall positive correlation between IF and SJR. IF is positively influenced by SCR and negatively by self-cited rate. In contrast, SJR is positively influenced by self-cited rate and journal citations per document, while not significantly influenced by SCR.

CONCLUSIONS Despite the increase in rank indicators, Latin American medical journals still concentrate at a rather low SJR and IF when being compared to the rest of the world.