[The growing challenge of the editorial process in Revista Médica de Chile].

During the recent 6 years, a growing number of manuscripts have been submitted annually to Revista Médica de Chile. In 2005 this number was 60% greater than in the year 2000. This determined an increased workload in the editorial handling of manuscripts and in the number of external peer reviewers, who were over 400 participants during 2004, each one reviewing from one to five manuscripts in that year. An increasing use of the electronic mail helps to communicate editors with reviewers and authors. However, there is yet no availability of a software in Spanish to handle all communications in the editorial process in this language. The number of pages per issue has been increased and authors have been requested to limit the extension of their manuscripts, in order to allow more accepted manuscripts to appear in a shorter period of time. At the present, an average of 8.9 months separates the date of submission to the date of publication, in those manuscripts that were accepted in revised version after external peer review. The increasing number of submissions and the fact that this journal ranks high among Chilean journals, in the number of visits to full-text articles in the web page www.scielo.cl, testify that in spite of the aforementioned limitations Revista Médica de Chile is well considered among authors and readers in Chile and other Spanish-speaking countries.