Transparency in DADOS: submissions, reviewers, and editorial workflow diversity in recent years ^*

ABSTRACT

This editorial discusses general data concerning the manuscripts workflow of DADOS , and the challenges faced by the journal in the last few years. It presents a scientometric analysis of several dimensions of the periodical’s workflow, ranging from submissions to the profile of reviews and reviewers also addressing persisting gender and spatial inequalities and the journal’s different impact metrics. The work aims to ensure greater transparency in editorial processes without losing sight of the discretion criteria that underly our anonymous peer-review system. Besides, our goal is to share the strategies employed to overcome obstacles faced by science communication in Brazil in the hope that they may work as instruments of resistance against the many and recurring crises faced by other national and international scientific journals.

science; scientific publishing; peer reviews; citations; gender diversity

RESUMO

Este editorial discute dados gerais sobre o fluxo dos manuscritos submetidos na revista DADOS , bem como os desafios que a publicação enfrentou nos últimos anos. Apresentamos aqui uma análise cienciométrica de diversas dimensões do nosso trabalho, desde as submissões recebidas até o perfil de seus pareceres e pareceristas, passando pelas persistentes desigualdades de gênero e de origem geográfica nesses âmbitos e pelas diferentes métricas de impacto da revista. Pretendemos assim garantir a mais ampla transparência de nossos processos editoriais, sem prejudicar, contudo, os critérios de discrição que embasam o sistema de revisão anônima por pares. Ademais, pretendemos compartilhar as estratégias que utilizamos para contornar os obstáculos interpostos à editoria científica brasileira, com a expectativa de que elas possam servir como instrumentos de resistência às crises sucessivas enfrentadas por outros periódicos científicos nacionais e internacionais.

ciência; editoria científica; revisão por pares; citações; diversidade de gênero

RÉSUMÉ

Cet éditorial présente des données générales concernant le flux de manuscrits soumis à DADOS et les défis de la publication ces dernières années. Nous présentons une analyse scientométrique de plusieurs dimensions du travail éditorial, depuis les soumissions reçues jusqu’au profil de ses référées, en passant par les inégalités de genre et d’origine géographique et les différentes métriques d’impact de la revue. Nous entendons ainsi assurer la plus grande transparence de nos processus éditorial, sans préjuger la discrétion propre du système d’évaluation anonyme. En outre, nous avons l’intention de partager les stratégies que nous avons utilisées pour surmonter les obstacles à la publication scientifique brésilienne, dans l’espoir qu’elles puissent servir d’instruments de résistance aux crises successives auxquelles sont confrontées d’autres revues scientifiques nationales et internationales.

science; publication scientifique; révision scientifique; citations; diversité sexuelle

RESUMEN

Este editorial presenta y discute datos generales sobre el flujo de los manuscritos enviados a la revista DADOS , así como los desafíos que la publicación enfrentó en los últimos años. Aquí presentamos un análisis de cienciometría sobre distintas dimensiones de nuestro trabajo, desde los envíos recibidos hasta el perfil de las evaluaciones y los evaluadores, pasando por las persistentes desigualdades de género y de origen geográfico en esos ámbitos y por las diferentes métricas de impacto de la revista. Pretendemos, de esta forma, garantizar la más amplia transparencia de nuestros procesos editoriales, sin perjudicar, no obstante, los criterios de discreción que sostienen el sistema de revisión anónima por pares. Además, pretendemos compartir las estrategias que utilizamos para responder a los obstáculos interpuestos a la edición científica brasilera, con la expectativa de que puedan servir como instrumentos de resistencia a las crisis sucesivas enfrentadas por otros periódicos científicos nacionales e internacionales.

ciencia; edición científica; revisión por pares; citaciones; diversidad de género

INTRODUCTION

Academic publishing has been undergoing challenges that are at least paradoxical. On the one hand, the world’s expectations about scientific responses to Covid-19 pandemic – when scientific research may literally save lives – made it urgent to make research communication faster, reliable, transparent, and public. Curiously, these expectations increase in a moment in which scientific communication faces structural transformations related to openness and transparency in research processes – a program often termed “open science”. On the other hand, the world of science is the target of so many unprecedented attacks, which are often orchestrated by coalitions either politically or economically interested in its failure and censorship. These attacks refer to negationist opinions or ideologies, especially to financial constraints that join these perspectives in eroding academic research worldwide and in Brazil.

These challenges did not start with the pandemic. Years earlier, in 2017, the Rio de Janeiro state government promoted funding cuts that mainly affected DADOS , and soon after that, it declared a state of emergency. As if this context were not detrimental enough to scientific journals, these events nearly dissolved our publishing team and traditional funding sources. It is not an exaggeration to say that the journal, which had recently celebrated its 50^thanniversary, was about to close.

Adverse conditions have only deepened since then. However, DADOS has managed to rebuild its team and rearrange its funding as much as necessary to at least keep it running. This process relied on support from the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the Rio de Janeiro State University (IESP/UERJ) and the scientific community. Not only did we catch up with our workflow and update our editorial policy to make the review process faster and more reliable, we also started to incorporate best practices in open science, which is a set of radical transformations in publishing.

This editorial discusses the results of these efforts, as well as some remaining challenges. It presents a scientometric analysis of several dimensions of DADOS ’s workflow, ranging from submissions to the profile of reviews and reviewers, while also addressing persisting gender and spatial inequalities. The work aims to ensure greater transparency in editorial processes without losing sight of the discretion criteria underlying our anonymous peer-review system. Our main goal is to share the strategies we have used to overcome obstacles hoping that they may work as instruments of resistance for other scientific journals. Also, we attempt to inform the scientific community about the collective responsibility that binds us all – both the ones in charge of scientific publishing spaces and those who need these media to spread their works.

The text is divided into four sections. The first presents general information about our editorial workflow, encompassing the average manuscript evaluation time, acceptance, and rejection rates. The second introduces a new content analysis about the reviews received by the journal, its reviewers’ profile, and their justifications for rejecting papers. Followingly, we address gender and geographic origin inequalities among our community of authors and reviewers, reflecting upon the unequal effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the participation of men and women in these activities, as well as on geographic diversity. Finally, the fourth and final section reveals ongoing initiatives to modernize, maintain and expand the quality and visibility of numbers in DADOS .

There is no science without scientific communication, which relies heavily on academic journals. As cold and technical as editorial policies may seem, they always attempt to favor specific standards of scientific rigor, leading to a particular way of doing, communicating, and debating research. Therefore, analyzing mechanisms, struggles, and changes in our workflow and editorial policies means reflecting on their role in the conduction of some scientific fields. Thus we expect to contribute to a deeper reflection on academic publishing from Brazil`s social sciences.

SUBMISSIONS

Some features of DADOS distinguish it from other Brazilian Social Sciences journals. Launched in 1966, it is one of the oldest in its field in the country, and one of the first to adhere to a peer-review system still in the 1970s. DADOS was also the first of its kind to join the SciELO Platform in 1996 and one of the platform’s few periodicals to issue four numbers every year. In addition, the journal is indexed in several national and international databases, which include the Web of Science platform. These and other factors draw a high number of submissions. Its yearly average is currently at 270 manuscripts, which translates into nearly one per day. Chart 1 illustrates the monthly variation in the number of submissions between Abril 2015 and April 2021.

Chart 1
: Manuscripts submitted to DADOS per month (2015-2021)

Two periods of time stand out in Chart 1 . The first spans from 2015 to mid-2017 and suggests a decreasing number of submissions, hitting bottom in May 2017. This occurrence was not a casual trend but rather the peak of the crisis undergone by the state of Rio de Janeiro and its effects on our publishing team. Since 2019, however, a gradual increase in submissions led to a peak in June 2020. The new scenario was due not only to the reestablishment of our team and funding, but also to an unintentional effect of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to the suspension of several academic activities worldwide and a consequent increase in manuscript submissions ( Else, 2020 ). Social distancing policies and the physical closure of universities changed the routine of most researchers, favoring an increase in submissions, which was nonetheless marked by signifigf02_encant gender inequalities, as we shall see.

Manuscripts submitted to DADOS go through many filters. In the first stage, called desk review evaluation, they are judged based on their form, style, and adequacy to the journal’s norms. Once they pass this stage, they go to the editorial board, which comprises associate editors who make a deeper analysis of their merit and pertinence to the periodical’s scope and finally suggest anonymous reviewers for the texts they approve. Ultimately, based on reviewers’ recommendations, editors make their final decision in the fourth stage. Chart 2 presents the percentage of texts rejected in each of these stages between 2015 and 2020.

Chart 2
: Rejection rates per stage of the editorial workflow (2015-2020)

In resonance with international averages for Social Sciences (Eberly, Warner, 1990; Hargens, 1988 ; Weller, 2001 ; Zuckerman, Merton, 1971), DADOS has had a rejection rate of about 70% in the period. The first filter (the desk review) is currently the most relevant one, having rejected or returned to authors ca. 46% of the 2020 submissions. Unfortunately, we lost the specialized assistant who played this role during the institutional crisis, which overloaded our editorial board. The number of texts rejected after reviews is also noteworthy, at about 25%. Finally, to be accurate, an average of 30% of texts were accepted for publication between 2015 and 2020 – 27% in 2020. As we shall see in the following section, DADOS often follows reviewers’ recommendations but tends to adopt slightly stricter decisions than the ones suggested.

Charts 3 presents the average number of days between a manuscript’s submission and the first editorial decision¹in each semester from 2017 to 2020. As one may notice, the financial crisis underwent by the journal substantially increased this number from early 2017 to early 2019, when it reached an average of 624 days. During this time, our team was devoted to a task force in the following months to catch up with the workflow and re-establish the relationship with authors and reviewers. The collective effort produced a consistent decrease in the indicator, which dropped to 421 days in the second semester of 2019 – the same value it had in early 2017. Despite a peak in manuscripts ( Chart 1) in the second semester of 2020, we reached the shortest period between submissions and first decisions: 116 days on average, which are below SciELO’s 200-day recommendation.

Chart 3
: Average evaluation time (in days) of manuscripts submitted to DADOS (2017-2020)

These results reflect some changes in our editorial policies. First, we established more straightforward rules and a thirty-day deadline for desk review rejections. Second, we outlined strict norms concerning manuscript formatting, essential abstract elements, and title size. Chart 4 presents the same data but aggregates the time between submissions and first decisions into a box plot. As one may notice, the increase in the 2019 average was significantly impacted by the multiplication of outliers, to be specific, by articles that waited for a long time for their first evaluation. Thus, although we have significantly decreased this average, some manuscripts still face a long wait for the first decisions.

Chart 4
: Box plot with the evaluation time of the manuscripts submitted to DADOS per year (2017-2020)

Whereas these changes were paramount to speeding up the first manuscript filter, we still needed to accelerate the peer-review process. Due to involving external agents, this stage does not depend on the effort of the journal’s editorial team. It is worth noting that reviewers’ work is completely anonymous and free of charge, which considerably reduces the motivation for scholars to engage in it. However, to make evaluation easier at this stage, we revamped the form to be completed by reviewers, including a simple questionnaire about the elements valued by the journal and a short manual with some principles which should guide the evaluation ( Campos, 2019 ). The following section further explores the effects of this change on peer-reviewing.

REVIEWS

Despite all the transformations scientific publishing has undergone, peer evaluation remains at its core. Contrary to what it may seem, even available review systems based on preprint servers²still rely on the work of reviewers, either because comments on open manuscripts are still a kind of review or because a considerable part of these manuscripts is still submitted to peer evaluation ( Bohlin, 2004 ). Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the need for caution when reading academic articles which have not undergone a peer-review process, despite the importance of their previous publication in preprint servers.

Nevertheless, there is no consensus yet about the reliability of blind peer-review systems. They have existed for over three centuries but only became widespread at the global level after the Second World War. Since then, there have been few systematic and comprehensive studies about the issue. However profuse, most literature on the theme is based on case studies circumscribed to a set of selected periodicals. This is because the ruling standards of scientific publishing are based not only on reviewer anonymity but also on the secrecy of their reviews, which are exclusively accessed by the authors involved and the editorial team.

To contribute to the debate on this subject, we present some quantitative information about the reviews given to DADOS . Since some manuscripts submitted in 2020 are still in the process of being published, we have opted to restrict our analysis to reviews about texts submitted in 2019. All reviews were from a double-blind system, in which neither authors nor reviewers know the identity of the people involved. In total, DADOS has received 366 reviews written by 262 different names, who have helped us evaluate a total of 173 manuscripts that reached this stage in 2019. Among these 366 reviews, 26% recommended accepting manuscripts, 26% recommended small changes, 20% suggested major changes, 12% recommended rejecting and requiring a resubmission, and 28% recommended rejection. The following chart demonstrates these data and the editorial board’s decision resulting from each review.

Chart 5
: Distribution of reviews by reviewers’ recommendations and the editorial board’s decisions (2019)

As shown by the above data, editorial decisions tend to follow reviewers’ recommendations – which corroborates several studies (Bornmann, Daniel, 2010). In DADOS , the former are usually slightly stricter than the latter since acceptance percentages are lower among editorial decisions than among peer evaluations. In 48% of evaluations, the editorial board followed reviewers’ recommendations, and 32% opted for a nearby decision – for instance when reviewers recommend “small changes” and the editorial board chooses neighboring options, such as “acceptance” or “major changes”. In 21% of cases, the editorial board did not follow reviews, making decisions that are distant from recommendations.

Out of the 173 manuscripts submitted or resubmitted in the period, 62% were accepted or rejected by the editorial board based on two reviews, 23% required three or more reviews, whereas 15% took only on review – which applies to resubmissions of previously accepted texts after minor changes. However, one must note that the total number of invitations to review (545) was relatively higher than the 366 reviews actually given. Apart from technical problems in reaching reviewers, such as out-of-date registers or e-mail addresses, the gap reveals a chronic problem of the peer-review system.

One of the assumptions behind the peer-review system implies that reviews should produce similar evaluations. Thus it is essential to have always at least two reviews per text. In order to measure the convergence between the reviews given to a given manuscript, the specialized literature usually deploys two indexes: Cohen’s Kappa Coefficient and the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) ( Bornmann, 2011 ). Moreover, both measure the degree to which two or more reviewers agree, discounting potential casual agreements. Despite differences in their calculations, both present the same metrics: values closer to 1 suggest higher reliability, while values closer to 0 imply lower reliability.

Nevertheless, there is no substantial or methodological consensus as to the value of these indexes as ways to measure the system’s reliability. First, because they were designed to check the reliability of multiple judgments made by common judges, this does not occur in a peer-review system, in which manuscripts are evaluated by different reviewers (Hargens, Herting, 1990). Second, because reviews do not determine the fate of manuscripts in evaluation systems but rather provide subsidies for a final decision. Thus, some experts consider disagreement between reviews to be a healthy way to enrich editorial deliberations ( Bornmann, 2011: 208) and not a piece of evidence against the system’s reliability as a whole. Due to that, both Kappa and ICC often present lower agreement rates in the most diverse areas. A systematic literature review about agreement among reviewers ( Bornmann, 2011: 207) reveals several journals’ coefficients to be below 0.4 and to vary substantially.

Table 1
: Reliability: agreement among reviewers

Journal	Kappa/ICC
Social Problems	.40
Journal of Educational Psychology	.34
British Medical Journal	.31
American Sociological Review	.28
Physiological Zoology	.28
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology	.26
New England Journal of Medicine	.26
Law & Society Review	.17
Angewandte Chemie International Edition	.15
Angewandte Chemie	.14
Physical Therapy	.12

Bornmann (2011

For all these reasons, we decided to use Cohen’s Kappa to estimate the agreement between the first two reviewers of the manuscripts analyzed here for exemplification purposes, excluding resubmissions evaluated by a single scholar. In addition, so as to simplify the calculation process, we merged five evaluation categories into two: suitable for publication (acceptance + small changes) and unsuitable for publication (major changes + rejection and resubmission + rejection). The overall result was 0.42 – which is higher than the studies mentioned in the above table.

Such quantitative studies about reviews usually ignore one of their most essential dimensions: content. The primary purpose of reviews is identifying problems in manuscripts, not merely to determine their acceptance or rejection but also to improve them. They are vital tools for scientific publishing to contribute to the improvement of specific scientific fields. Therefore, it is relevant to consider the most recurrent issues in manuscripts deemed good enough to have overcome the initial filters of the evaluation process. To investigate the most common problems, we split them into 15 categories based on the main kinds of criticism present in reviews. As revealed by Chart 6 , most reviews point to methodological problems in manuscripts (38%), followed by issues of style and clarity in writing (33%). Problems with literature reviews rank third (27%), after which comes the absence of original contributions (23%) and empirical data limitations (20%).

Chart 6
: Main targets of criticism in reviews (2019)

Chart 6 demonstrates the main insufficiencies presented in manuscripts and their connection with the journal’s editorial work. A preliminary analysis of previous years indicated the lack of original contributions to be the most recurrent issue identified by reviewers, which led the journal to include questions about the matter in submission and review forms. As a result, there was a decrease in this kind of criticism, which ranked fourth in 2019. However, methodological aspects still inform many adverse reactions in reviewers, which reflects different factors. First, the history of DADOS itself is traditionally linked to the publication of papers with methodological contributions. Second, following what Glaucio Ary Dillon Soares called the Achilles’ Heel of the education of social scientists in Brazil, the use of quantitative and – especially – qualitative methodologies lacks rigor (Soares, 2005).

Since we believe in the role of scientific publishing in improving overall quality, DADOS has been making an effort to ensure its texts’ methodological quality by inviting experts in the specific methodologies deployed in each manuscript and adhering to a policy of analysis replicability. Furthermore, since 2020, the journal has required databases and programming scripts used in papers to be indexed, emphasizing quantitative but also qualitative data, such as documents, interview transcriptions, images and others. We thus expect to incorporate the best practices of open science, besides strengthening the journal’s focus on the publication of methodologically rigorous studies with original contributions to academic and broader public debates.

DIVERSITY

Inequality in the Social Sciences varies from discipline to discipline. Data about Brazil, for example, show that Anthropology has the most female professionals, followed by the relative balance in Sociology and a prevailingly male presence in Political Science ( Carpiuc, 2016 ; Candido, Feres Júnior, Campos, 2019 ; Feres Júnior, 2020). In the latter, studies in different countries around the world have evidenced and attempted to explain the phenomenon of female underrepresentation in the authorship of articles and books.³Some of them suggest that the causes to this inequality can be: journals’ little openness to themes and methodologies which women predominate, such as gender studies or qualitative research, a lower number of female-authored submissions, specific obstacles to progress in their careers due to their overload with care work, their aversion to the risk of rejection, and a higher degree of self-pressure on their skills (Djupe, Smith, Solhey, 2018; Brown et al., 2019 ; Samuels, Teele, 2018).

During the Covid-19 pandemic, female underrepresentation in article authorship was subject to a new cycle of studies to measure the impacts of remote work on existing private-sphere inequalities. In Brazil, a survey conducted by the movement Parent in Science highlighted the issue of motherhood. Without distinguishing fields, it demonstrated that the academic productivities of black and white women with children were the most affected by the crisis ( Staniscuaski et al., 2021 ). In dialogue with these studies, authors have pointed to the risks involved in circumscribing analyses of female overload to motherhood since women also accumulate unpaid housework and care work even when they are not mothers (Castro, Chaguri, 2020).

In their turn, Cui, Ding, and Zhu (2020) analyzed 41,858 papers from different countries in the world’s largest Social Sciences preprint server and noticed that the publication gap between men and women is widening. Besides, they highlighted important differences among different areas, which may imply limitations to generalizations about scientific production. The number of manuscripts in Anthropology, for instance, suffered a generalized drop, whereas Political Science experienced a moment of growth – permeated, however, by increasing gender inequality among authors. Brazilian studies also suggest variation in the impact of the pandemic both concerning researchers’ gender and race and to fields within the Social Sciences. Anthropology was the most harmed area in terms of obstacles to developing methodologies such as ethnographies and participant observation. ( Candido et al., 2021 ).

In order to check the potential consequences of the pandemic for gender inequality in DADOS , we extracted authorship identification to classify their sex based on statistics from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). To do that, we installed an R programming package that calculated and categorized the authors into “female” or “male”.⁴The remaining names, unrecognized after running the program, were computed manually. Results ( Chart 7 ) show that the peak in submissions in the second semester of 2020 was mostly led by texts with male first authors. As to differences among the Social Sciences, the peak might have been due to the journal’s thematic inclinations, which usually favor Political Science and Sociology papers (Campos, Feres Júnior, Guarnieri, 2017) rather than Anthropology. The latter seems to have been comparatively more affected by the drastic changes in social life during the early pandemic crisis (Cui, Ding, Zhu, 2020; Candido et al., 2021 ).

Chart 7
: Number of submissions by gender of leading authors and trimester (2017-2020)

On May 14, 2020, about two months after the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 pandemic, we published preliminary results on Blog da DADOS revealing a drop in female submissions at the beginning of the quarantine. Our analysis, which encompassed a part of the second trimester of 2020 (2020.2), showed that only 13% of papers were led by female authors (Candido, Campos, 2020 ) – a rather concerning percentage compared to the journal’s usual averages. As shown in Chart 8 , women recovered their participation before the trimester was over and finished the period leading to 30% of texts. Yet, it is the lowest level between 2017 and the first trimester of 2021, only comparable to the fourth trimester of 2019. For that matter, it is worth noting that the publication of a text about this problem on our website was followed by an increase in female-led submissions. Of course, one cannot determine whether one thing led to the other, but we have been encouraging a debate about diversity and female-author submissions in the journal.

Chart 8
: Percentage of female-led submissions by trimester (2017-2020)

Chart 9 , which addresses the total number of authors regardless of author order, shows that inequality between men and women remains, although in a less intense manner. Counting only the gender of leading authors, the average ratio between men and women is 1.76, whereas considering the available number of men and women authors regardless of order drops that ratio to 1.45. This vital piece of information suggests that the order of authors within papers may be evidence of the internal division of academic labor by gender, in which female participation does not necessarily translate into full equality.

Chart 9
: Number of authors by gender (regardless of author order) (2017-2020)

Comparing the female-first authors ( Chart 8 ) and the general percentage of female authors ( Chart 10 ) over the years shows that the female gender is better represented in research partnerships than in coordination positions. Only in the first trimester of 2018 did data indicate a 1% female advantage in leadership positions. It is worth considering, however, that some submissions place authorship in alphabetical order.

Chart 10
: Percentage of female authors by trimester

Still, concerning gender diversity, DADOS has been making an effort to promote balance in the nomination of reviewers. As a result, in 2020, we nearly reached our goal, having achieved 42% of women reviewers and 58% of men.

Gender, however, is not the only significant category for discussing inequality in the production of knowledge. We could address, for instance, race, class, and sexual orientation factors, but these data are not accessible yet.⁵ DADOS uses the ScholarOne platform for managing manuscripts, which enables the extraction of certain features from articles, such as authors’ names and institutions.

Table 2 shows the national origin of the authors between 2018 and 2020, quantified based on the location of their respective institutions. Results about the last few years reinforce trends outlined in previous editorials ( Bringel, 2016 ), which highlight Portuguese and Spanish as the languages of choice of manuscripts submitted to the journal. The pandemic that started in 2020 did not significantly impact these numbers.

Table 2
: Submissions by country of origin (2018-2020)

Country	2018	2019	2020	Total
Brazil	162	160	233	555
Spain	33	18	29	80
Chile	17	18	13	48
Colombia	22	17	9	48
Portugal	11	12	15	38
Mexico	5	6	6	17
Ecuador	3	1	3	7
Argentina	2	3	3	8
Turkey	-	3	4	7
Russia	2	2	-	4
USA	1	-	1	2
China	2	-	-	2
Indonesia		1	2	3
Poland	1	-	2	3
France	-	1	1	2
Greece	-	-	2	2
Iraq	-	-	2	2
Pakistan	1	-	1	2
United Kingdom	1	1	-	2
Uruguay	-	1	1	2
Others*	-	3	9	12

Source: Based on data from ScholarOne.
• * Others: Angola, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Japan, Jordan, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe

Notwithstanding, authors from foreign countries, often present content circumscribed to case studies about local groups or specific regions, which lie outside the scope of DADOS . Also, manuscripts frequently do not meet the journal’s mandatory norms – which also occurs in studies submitted by Brazilians. Despite all that, 46% of texts in 2020 were published in other languages, under the recommendations of SciELO Network. Among 13 total cases, 3 were released in bilingual fashion after being translated with editorial funding from Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

POST-PUBLICATION

Another constant effort of our editorial team focuses on monitoring our citation metrics. These indicators have to be sure been receiving sharper and sharper criticism, either because their calculations are based on databases restricted to already dominant countries in global scientific geopolitics ( Martinovich, 2020 ) or because their calculation formulae always express debatable notions of academic impact ( Hicks et al., 2015 ). Thus, we will not take them as absolute proof of our papers ‘ quality, but rather as evidence of the potential and limitations of our editorial work. The following table compares the performance of some of them in the last two years.

Table 4
: Impact metrics for DADOS

Impact metric	2019	2020
Impact factor (Web of Science, Clarivate)	0.288	0.357
H5 (Google Scholar)	17	17
CiteScore (Scopus)	0.5	0.6
SJR (Scimago)	0.240	0.211
SNIP (CWTS)	0.76	0.86

• Source: Based on data from each database.

The metrics of DADOS usually present excellent stability. We made considerable progress with our Impact Factor for Web of Science (Clarivate) and with CiteScore (Scopus) – both of which are databases focused on international citations, especially on papers in English. Both indexes have similar calculation methods, considering the ratio between the number of citations to a collection and the number of papers published by the journal, which mainly varies depending on the size of databases and the period considered. Google Scholar’s h5, which estimates the number of articles from a journal that have been cited the same number of times in the previous five years,⁶has remained stable at 17, along with most Brazilian Social Sciences periodicals in the period. Only Scimago’s SJR has detected a drop from 0.240 to 0.211. This change may have because the index is influenced by the definition of the journal’s thematic field, which belongs to the generic Human Sciences category according to Scimago. Finally, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), which gives weight to impact calculations depending on the total citations in a thematic field, also improved.⁷

In alignment with the plan for open science, we have invested in making scientific communication mechanisms more plural. The journal has joined nearly all existing virtual channels to promote texts and debates. Table 3 lists the means joined by DADOS and its audience in each network, aiming to increase the impact of articles and cater to different generations of scholars.

Table 3
: Science communication by DADOS

Media	Audience
Website and blog	Ca. monthly 12,000 visits
Facebook	4,563 followers
Twitter	3,169 followers
Instagram	1,552 followers
Mailchimp	1,505 subscriptions
Podcast	795 episode streams
YouTube	1,563 views8

Source: Based on data from each network.

Added to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the digitalization of academic life, these investments in modernization led to a significant rise in our social media impact. This can be seen by the number of mentions to DADOS articles measured by altmetric.com, especially on Twitter. Chart 11 indicates that mentions to the journal had already been increasing in 2019, but they recurrently beat records in the last three trimesters of 2020 – a period that matches pandemic’s peak.

Chart 11
: Mentions to DADOS papers measured by the website altmetric.com

In accordance with the transparency of its methodological procedures, the journal has started to accept manuscripts published in preprint servers and to require the provision of the databases and algorithms supporting their analyses. Preprints were created to make data from studies available faster since the numerous stages involved in publishing research often make it a slow process, whereas the request for databases aims to validate the results presented in papers by peers.

A study published in DADOS (volume 64, number 3) by George Avelino, Scott Desposato, and Ivan Mardegan (2021) analyzed Political Science articles in Brazilian periodicals and demonstrated that Brazilian studies still fell short when it came to transparency and data replicability. Implementing this rule in DADOS has the goal, thus, of helping revert this problem. Also, we have expanded the range of submissions accepted by the journal with the same purpose. Furthermore, this year the journal will start to publish critical commentaries and notes on ongoing investigations. Thus, both lines of work shall provide debates about research projects with more richness and maturity.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The objective of this text was to provide information about manuscripts submitted to DADOS and situate the journal amid an adverse context. We have highlighted numbers about the editorial workflow, the diversity of authors’ and reviewers’ social profiles, and the editorial team’s science communication initiatives. Data revealed some persisting obstacles to scientific publishing, such as managing an intense flow of manuscripts and dealing with funding difficulties that threaten both journals and universities as a whole. Besides, we also considered the essential role of constantly fighting inequalities in science and increasing its impact inside and outside of the academic world.

We have made significant breakthroughs, especially in reducing the average time between manuscript submissions and evaluations, monitoring gender inequality in our workflow, and expanding our science communication networks. However, many challenges remain, such as increasing the attention given to racial inequality, about which we lack data, and gradually advancing open science practices. Of course, all of these challenges are influenced by the journal’s struggles with funding, which affect not only DADOS but Brazilian science in general. Yet, we persist in our efforts to ensure that Brazilian and foreign social scientists can find one of the best places to read and to spread their research in our pages.

Agradecimentos

* We would like to thank: the journal’s editorial board for suggestions and reviews to this text: Breno Bringel, Carlos Antonio Costa Ribeiro, Charles Pessanha, Fernando Guarnieri, and Letícia Pinheiro. Most data used in this editorial were produced by our editorial team, comprising Marina Bezerra, Murilo Gomes Costa, Matheus Pestana, and Marcia Rangel Candido. Finally, we thank Marcos Campos for coding the anonymous reviews used in one of the sections.

REFERÊNCIAS

• AUCKLAND University of Technology. (2021), “Research Impact”. Auckland University of Technology . 1 set. 2021 [Acessado em 1 de jun. 2021]. Disponível em https://aut.ac.nz.libguides.com/impact
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NOTES

• 1
  . When manuscripts are not accepted, authors may present them again or resubmit them. Therefore, some manuscripts may account for more than one editorial decision.
• 2
  . DADOS has produced a short lesson about the subject, published on Blog da DADOS and translated for publication on the blog SciELO Perspectiva (Campos, 2021a; 2021b).
• 3
  . See, among others, Young (1995) , Fernández (2006), Carpiuc (2016) , Breuning and Sanders (2007) , Evans and Moulder (2011) , Williams et al. (2015) , Teele and Thelen (2017) , Konig and Popers (2018), Campos, Feres and Guarnieri (2017), Samuels and Teele (2018) , Mendes and Figueira (2019) , Candido, Campos and Feres Júnior (2021).
• 4
  . The R package that we used as a starting point for the classification was that of researcher Fernando Meirelles. Available at: https://fmeireles.com/blog/rstats/genderbr-predizer-sexo/ Accessed on 4 nov. 2021.
• 5
  . DADOS recently added an item for racial self-declaration to its submission system.
• 6
  . In other words, a 17 h5 means that 17 papers published on DADOS have been cited 17 or more times over the previous five years.
• 7
  . Cf. Auckland (2021) for more information about each index.
• 8
  . This number adds up the views of two videos published by the communication team of DADOS: “Desenho de Pesquisa e Redação Acadêmica” ( Campos, 2020 ) and “O que são preprints?” (Campos, 2021c).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Dec 2021
• Date of issue
  2022