Jornal Vascular Brasileiro: 5 years

EDITORIAL

Jornal Vascular Brasileiro: 5 years

Winston Bonetti Yoshida

Editor-in-chief, J Vasc Bras

The Jornal Vascular Brasileiro was created in 2002, when Dr Márcio Meirelles was the president of SBACV (Brazilian Society of Angiology and Vascular Surgery), and the first editor-in-chief was Dr Telmo Bonamigo. After Dr Bonamigo decided to resign, in December 2004, the current president of SBACV, Dr Liberato K. Moura, invited me to be the editor-in-chief of our journal. Five years have passed by since then. During these years we received total support from the next presidents of SBACV (and the respective boards), namely Dr Liberato K. Moura, Dr Airton D. Frankini, and Dr José Luiz C. Nascimento e Silva.

I believe that J Vasc Bras has had a significant development throughout time, being indexed in the SciELO database at the end of 2004, an achievement that improved very much our journal's reputation. J Vasc Bras has been included in several indexing databases throughout time, such as Elsevier’s Bibliographic Databases EMBASE and SCOPUS and EBSCO Publishing, among others. Being indexed in these databases makes the access to the content of our journal easier, increasing its visibility and impact. Our main current goals are to be indexed in the MEDLINE and ISI databases, which currently are the most important benchmarks in terms of indexation. We completed the processes to be included in these databases at the end of 2008 and in the beginning of 2009, respectively.

The recent decision of the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Improvement of Higher Education (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, CAPES) of lowering the classification level of the Brazilian journals was a great setback for these journals that struggled with great difficulty to survive or even compete with large, reputable international journals that have been in the publishing market for many years. Important editorials have questioned this inconvenient and controversial authoritative and unilateral decision of CAPES¹ and these texts express the thought of the Brazilian editors. We have held several meetings with the Scientific Board of the Brazilian Medical Association (AMB) to try to change this inappropriate decision. However, in order to counterbalance this tough blow from CAPES, the authors of SBACV need to increase the number of manuscripts submitted to our journal. This is our best strategy of defense against this attack. The several meetings held during 2009 with the AMB made CAPES to acknowledge this problem, and some alternatives to counterbalance the negative effects of the new Qualis classification were suggested, such as, for instance, the establishment of an equivalence factor for manuscripts published in national journals.

In spite of the difficulties, there have been advances in the dynamics of J Vasc Bras, such as: financial support from the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), implementation of online submission and peer review process, videos posted online, ahead of print publication, and thorough revision of the instructions to authors, including the conflict of interest statement and detailed description of each author contribution to the studies, so that J Vasc Bras could reach the same level as great international journals.

The number of submissions showed a significant increase since the journal was created (Figure 1), and the number of citations have also grown as shown in the SciELO website (www.scielo.br/jvb). Our impact factor in SciELO has grown from 0.2436 to 0.3942 from 2007 to 2008. The quality of our manuscripts was guaranteed by the peer review process carried out by our reviewers. I also must mention the increasing number of submissions from abroad and the editorials contributed by important foreign researchers, which confirms the reputation achieved by our journal.

According to the regulatory norms of SBACV, my term as editor-in-chief has finished after 5 years of activity. However, as allowed by the regulatory norms, I received another invitation from the board of directors of SBACV to remain as editor-in-chief for 5 more years. I was flattered by this new nomination, but I only accepted it after my peers expressed their support during the assembly to render accounts, which was held during the last congress of SBACV in Maceió.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors and reviewers who actively participated in the development of J Vasc Bras during this period, submitting and reviewing manuscripts. I also would like to thank our editorial office (Scientific) and SciELO, which worked with us for the development of J Vasc Bras during these 5 years. I also would like to thank the CNPq for the financial support and the several boards of directors of SBACV for the unlimited support provided so that I could freely serve as editor-in-chief, without interferences in the journal's dynamics. For the next term as editor-in-chief, we will try to achieve the goals of indexation, the graphic layout of the printed version of the journal will be changed and the editorial board will be restructured along with the new Board of SBACV with the purpose of improving the dynamics of the peer review process.

Reference

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  1. Rocha-e-Silva M. O Novo Qualis, que não tem nada a ver com a ciência do Brasil. Carta aberta ao presidente da CAPES. Clinics. 2009;64:721-4.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 Mar 2010
• Date of issue
  Dec 2009