Introduction: In order to guarantee an adequate editorial process, it is necessary a team work of publishers, director and editorial committee, whose main purpose is to publish papers with an adequate scientific and methodological accuracy, which need a great effort to maintain quality, guarantee scientific validity and to protect potential readers of the final product , they have access to. Objective: To characterize the Revista Habanera de Ciencias Médicas from metric indicators. Material and methods: A scientific and metric study of this publication from 2002 to 2016 was carried out. We evaluated the bibliographic variables published by Publish or Perish and the metric indicators provided by SciELO and also SciELO Citation Index. Results: The journal has an H index of 18, with more than a thousand of published authors. The average number of authors per article is three and there is a favorable balance between the distribution of cited and non-cited articles. It contributes with more cites than it receives and does not have a high number of self-cites. Conclusions: The Revista Habanera de Ciencias Médicas has been showing results that place it among the best positioned journals related with health issue in the databases of greater coverage, which is demonstrated from the analysis of its metric indicators.