The impact factor of the Anais and its insertion into the national scientific scene

EDITORIAL

The impact factor of the Anais and its insertion into the national scientific scene

The Scientific Editor of the Anais Brasileiros de Dermatologia calls the attention of readers and authors to new information and details added to the Instructions to collaborators. This initiative of improvement and constant updating of the norms for manuscript submission aims at the enhancement of the technical quality of our journal. Meeting technical requirements that apply to scientific journals, such standards will not be changed for the duration of the volume, i.e., throughout the year. For this reason, they will be published only in the first issue of the journal and not printed in the remaining issues, even though they will still be available on the journal website (www.anaisdedermatologia.org.br). With the purpose of making easy the process of looking information up, the standards are printed in a detachable booklet.

The “Impact Factor” (IF) of a scientific journal has been considered as the gauge of its influence in the scientific universe where it is present. Proposed in 1955 by Eugene Garfield in the United States of América, the “journal impact factor” was created in the beginning of the 60’s to facilitate the selection of journals for the then-existent Science Citation Index. The IF is based on two elements: the ‘number of citations in the current year’ obtained by published articles in a certain journal in the two immediately previous years, which is equivalent to the ‘numerator’ of the equation, divided by the number of articles published in that journal in the two reference years, utilized as the ‘denominator’ of the equation. As an example, the IF for 2005 utilizes the number of citations of articles published in 2004 and 2003 in the Anais Brasileiros de Dermatologia received in 2005 divided by the number of articles published in the Anais in 2004 and 2005.

The SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) has, for some time, published a series of useful statistical data referring to the journals that make up its database, and, among them, the IF of the national journals. Unfortunately, the IF of the Anais calculated for 2005 falls short of what should be desired and is not compatible with the robustness of Brazilian dermatology, and, besides it does not correspond to its real insertion in the national scientific scene. In other words, articles published in them are not cited in a manner befitting their quality and importance. There are some reasons for this. For example, we have still been publishing articles one or two years after their submission date; that is, they are papers that cite other Anais articles outside of the two-year period that counts for the IF. Another reason, obviously, is the Brazilian author’s habit of not giving due value, in scientific terms, to what is produced and published internally.

SciELO, likewise, provides data that tell us who cites us. In 2005, the Anais received 92 citations, considering papers published in the Anais at any time in the journal’s history. Out of these 92 citations, papers in the Anais were cited by articles in the Anais themselves 71 times (77.2%). Other journals that featured papers making reference to the Anais were: Cadernos de Saúde Pública (five times); Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical (four times); Revista do Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo (three times); Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia (two times); Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins Including Tropical Diseases, Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Revista de Saúde Pública, Revista Brasileira de Ginecologia e Obstetrícia, Arquivos Brasileiros de Oftalmologia and Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira (one time each).

It is urgent that we change this profile so as to more vigorously exert our influence on the universe of national scientific publications. Part of this effort is the promotion of one more edition of two complementary events, the Course on Scientific Methodology and the Symposion of the Brazilian Annals of Dermatology during the 61st. Conference of the Brazilian Society of Dermatology to be held in Curitiba, Paraná. We, therefore, extend the invitation to Service chairpersons, professors, and graduate students in general to participate in those events and discuss with us initiatives and strategies that may potentialize our scientific production.

Bernardo Gontijo

Scientific Editor of Anais Brasileiros de Dermatologia

Sílvio Alencar Marques

Associate Scientific Editor

Everton Siviero do Vale

Associate Scientific Editor

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 May 2008
• Date of issue
  Mar 2006