1. Introduction

The idea of ​​creating the ALCONPAT Journal came up within the framework of the 2003 CONPAT Congress, when the actual need to have a formal dissemination mechanism in said association was raised for the first time; a serious, academic, and original journal that would focus on its efforts on those subjects cultivated for almost 30 years in the Association. The evolution of the idea and the project took several years to consolidate, but everything was reinforced as the collection of quality works presented at CONPAT events increased. It was during the 2009 CONPAT Congress that the formal project for the creation of the Journal was formally presented to the Superior Council, the highest administrative body of the Association, obtaining its approval to officially start its activities in the following year. During 2010, intensive work was carried out on the design and implementation of the website to attend the mechanisms for sending, receiving, evaluating, and publishing articles; finally, on December 31, 2010, the first issue was electronically published, corresponding to the year 2011, making itself known as "ALCONPAT Journal" (or RA for its acronym).

In 2013, the legal information registry was generated, that includes the right of exclusive international use of the name “Revista ALCONPAT” and its corresponding ISSN number: 2007-6835 (^{Castro-Borges, et al. 2013}).

In 2015, during the publication of the Volume 5, RA participated in the Call to belong to the index of Scientific and Technological Journals of Conacyt (National Council of Science and Technology - Mexico), achieving such distinction in the same year. This fact is a watershed that drove the RA towards higher standards, such as membership in prestigious indices, migration to the OJS (Open Journal System) platform and DOI (Digital Object Identifier) ​​number, among others. Currently the journal has risen to the highest level of "Internationally Competent Journal" in Conacyt.

In 2016, thanks to the indexing of CONACyT, it was possible to incorporate the journal into the Scielo Mexico index, as well as into the SciELO Citation Index, a database that is part of the Web of Science. In 2017 RA started in Google Scholar where important data can be consulted.

In 2018 the RA applied for a long process towards its inclusion in Scopus, and a year later the feedback received suggested small changes, which were implemented and will be evaluated again in May 2021. In 2018 the RA was incorporated into other Indexes such as Redalyc, and in the OJS 2 platform a statistics section was incorporated to enable monitoring which articles are downloaded the most, which country visits us the most, which is the most consulted number, etc., as well as the implementation of publishing XML Jats. Similarly, the RA was included in 2018 in the Latindex Catalog and directory.

In 2020 the RA moved to the most recent and stable version of the OJS evaluation system (Version 3.2.1.4), a new portal design, with new built-in plugins such as XML Viewer, Catch module, article sharing module, etc.; the editorial and ethical policies were updated, accordance with the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) in order to increase visibility and accessibility. The option was chosen to change the Creative Commons license to a more open one with fewer restrictions (CC BY, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which is a requirement to belong to the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). Another important index requirement is the digital preservation system, that we currently have, an anti-plagiarism software license (iThenticate with Crossref Similarity Check), and also a Google Analytics tool, which provides individual statistics per item and other enhancements that will allow the entry, during 2021-2022, to DOAJ and probably to Scopus and JCR. It is noteworthy that the RA currently had an Impact Factor (IF) in Scielo Analytics (Table 1) of 0.03 in 2016, which later increased to 0.16 in 2019; we are confident that it will improve and be endorsed when it is incorporated into other indices.

As a result of the increased visibility of the RA, there has also been an increase in queries and downloads, as shown in Figure 1. The variety of countries that consult the RA is particularly striking, as can be seen in Figure 2, and in quantitative form in Table 2. The RA has been reviewed and/or downloaded in more than 130 countries; the trend in distribution of these downloads reflects, in some way, the geographical distribution of authors, access to information sources, the degree of scientific development, etc.

Figure 1 Downloads and visits to the page, number of queries to summarize the articles from 2016 to 2021. (source: OJS of the Revista Alconpat)  

Figure 2 Countries with the highest number of visits, in red. (OJS from Revista Alconpat) 

The RA has the highest internationalization index considered by Redalyc, Figure 3, which is made up of 5 groups and 5 subgroups. The highest level of internationalization is defined by G1 and the lowest G5. This index is derived from three variables with different weights:

1. Proportion (%) of foreign authors (value 0.25);

2. Number of foreign countries (value 0.35);

3. Proportion of articles with at least one foreign author (value 0.45).

The level of internationalization of a journal allows observing the level of foreign participation.

Group G11 indicates the highest level of internationalization and G55 the least internationality or greater endogeneity. Redalyc considered the creation of the subgroups important because G21 indicates that it is very close to G1, while G25 indicates that it is much closer to G3 and with the probability of descending from the group. Maintaining the G1 is a challenge for any journal, and especially those that aspire belonging to important scientific indexes.

Figure 3 Internationalization index of the Revista Alconpat (Data and figure courtesy of Redalyc).  

One of the challenges of the RA has been to maintain a standard in terms of timeliness and publication times. From the beginning, an optimal average trend was established towards 17 weeks (4 months) from submission to publication, which according to Redalyc has remained very close to 17.39 as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Average weeks of reception - acceptance of the Revista Alconpat: 17.39 weeks (Data courtesy of Redalyc).  

Like other journals that are evaluated in various indexes, the Alconpat Journal must maintain a citable production, The trends in these 10 years have been those of an increase in citable production as denoted by research and review articles published since then. The distribution by type of article during these 10 years can be seen in Figure 5.

Figure 5 Distribution of documents by type of article (Data courtesy of Scielo Analytics) 

Undoubtedly, the internationalization of the RA is still mostly from Latin America, as seen in Figure 6, although papers from the rest of the world are becoming more common. A strong influence from Brazil and Mexico have marked the course of the RA in these 10 years.

Figure 6 Distribution of documents by country of publication (data from Scielo Analytics) 

The number of authors per article is an issue that increasingly involves evaluation in the Science and Technology Councils of our countries. Figure 7 shows this trend in the RA, showing a predominance of 3-4 authors, which is quite attractive for evaluation systems such as Mexico or Brazil. It is also worth noting the significant presence of articles with a single author, which denotes independence and leadership of the authors that choose the RA, which coincide with the trajectory of those authors regarding their citation.

Figure 7 Distribution of documents by number of authors per article (data from Scielo Analytics). 

Another important aspect in the quality of a Journal is the number of references in the papers, which for the RA the average is of around 20, see Figure 8, which is an acceptable number after taking into account that the citable production relative to basic or applied research articles and to reviews is around 2/3 of the total production, Figure 5.

To sum up, the RA has a general positive trend (upward, lasting, and constant step) in its modest statistics so far, which could be summarized in a gradual and constant increase of its impact factor, Table 1. By the time of this publication, we already have had feedback from DOAJ, so it is likely that, according to the plans, we will be applying with very good possibilities to Scopus and JCR.

Figure 8 Distribution of documents by number of bibliographic references per article (Scielo Analytics) 

The future of RA looks bright and fruitful. 10 years away, a wide recognition must be made of the original editorial staff and those who have joined this initiative, which has led us to where we are now. Undoubtedly, the greatest recognition belongs to our article authors, who have trusted our journal and invested time, money, and effort to publish their research work with us, despite the fact that many of them have had better options at their moment. Finally, our readers, whom without them we are nobody, deserve our appreciation for reading, downloading, and citing us; their preference will certainly provide the RA, in a short period of time, opportunities to continue improving through better tools for consultation and indexing. On behalf of the Editorial Board, many, many, many thanks to all of you. During 2021, and at the close of this edition, these 10 years were honored with an academic celebration on May 19; the schedule of said act is included here as a tribute for the posterity in the annex.

A special thanks are due to the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt) of Mexico, through which we have had the support of the projects (2013 call, declared as a competent national magazine (September 2, 2013), 2014 -2015 call, project no.140028 (October 30, 2014), call 2016, declared as an international competent journal (September 5, 2016), Call 2017, project 290978 (March 21, 2017) and the last call 2018-2019, project 297368 ( July 16, 2018) to finance Alconpat Journal in various stages that have allowed it to reach standards with which it has been possible to be applying and obtaining important indexes.