EDITORIAL

The new horizon for RBFAR

Maique Weber Biavatti; Cid Aimbiré M. Santos

Editors

Reports 2010 last June, we received several questions on the situation of the Brazilian Journal of Pharmacognosy (BJP). Through them, we realize that for many of our readers and authors there are still doubts about the non-disclosure of the impact factor of our journal and its consequences. About this, it is important to clarify that:

1. The RBFAR did not lose any indexing and remains present in the following databases: Chemical Abstracts, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstracts, Natural Products Alert, Natural Products Updates, CABI, LILACS, SCOPUS, SciELO, EMBASE, Compendex, GEOBASE, EMBiology, FLUIDEX, World Textiles and Elsevier BIOBASE, Biological Abstracts, Index Copernicus, Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch^®), Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition, ISI and SIIC Data Bases.

2. By 2013, Thomson Reuters will monitor and track the RBFAR scientometric data in order to verify if the "problem of self-citations" has been resolved. During this period, RBFAR will not have its impact factor published in JCR. However, we can guarantee that we are treading the right path to achieve the legitimate IF of BJP by 2013. This can be checked by analyzing the 2010 data published by SCImago/Scopus (http://br4.in/8bGmd), illustrated by the graphs in Figure 1 below.

It may be noted that self-citations decreased significantly, and there was also a positive trend in the number of foreign citations. Through these graphs and other data available in SCImago, we can estimate that the impact factor of BJP today would be around 0.64.

Another analysis that we must highlight here are the statistics of BJP in 2011. Since January 1, 2011 until the release of this issue, we have received exactly 301 submissions, of which 144 were sent to reviewers, 70 are under review and only 22 were accepted. This leads to an acceptance percentage of only 15% of articles submitted, with an average time of 40 days between submission and acceptance. When we took over the journal in June 2009, the manuscripts were received and evaluated through the post and there had been accepted articles awaiting publication for two years. Immediately, we provided the online system offered by SciELO to give flexibility and security to the submissions, and only this year, we were able to update the publications.

We still have a long way towards excellence, as to what we understand as the Quality Standard of a scientific journal, and the entire editorial board is working hard on this purpose. One of the innovations of this new editorship is the advance disclosure of articles that are accepted and edited in the Epub (ahead of print) of SciELO, increasing the exposure time and the possibility of articles being cited and indexed in international databases while awaiting the final publication.

It is noteworthy also that the Editorial Board is currently composed of nine enthusiastic lecturers who are engaged in the selection of manuscripts to be published in BJP. We enhance and discuss constantly the criteria for acceptance and immediate rejection, and with the same consistency we are expanding the list of registered reviewers, including gradually more renowned foreign researchers, which have contributed greatly to the internationalization of published works.

Certainly this approach will contribute to the quality of work submitted to the journal, and consequently to the research projects linked to the Graduate Programs in the area of Pharmacy and the like, which will also receive benefits from the qualification of the journal.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 Aug 2011
• Date of issue
  Aug 2011