Background: the assessment of journals is undoubtedly a continuous process that is determined by the quality of scientific papers and authors’ recognition of the most cited scientific journals.
Objective: to describe the ranking of Cuban medical journals according to the h5-index.
Methods: a bibliometric study of all scientific journals related to Cuban medical sciences included in the Virtual Health Library was conducted. The h5-index and the h5-median obtained through Google Scholar Metrics were used to calculate the ranking.
Results: eighty two point seven percent of Cuban medical journals have an h5-index registered in Google Scholar Metrics. Seventy two percent are indexed in SciELO Cuba. The average h5-index for Cuban medical journals is 6.88 and the h-median is 6.00. For those indexed in SciELO Cuba, the h5-index is 7.60. The h5-index of journals published by ECIMED is 8.69; showing significant differences in relation to other publishers in the country. Among the top 20 Cuban medical journals according to the Google Scholar H5-index, only seven are not edited by ECIMED.
Conclusions: the assessment of national journals using the h5-index is vital, even considering its weaknesses, since most of these journals are not included in databases such as Scopus and WOS. More in..