Brazilian Journal of Nephrology: looking ahead

Upon taking over the position of Editor-in-Chief of the Brazilian Journal of Nephrology (JBN), I want to acknowledge the hard work and the success achieved by those who preceded me, particularly Jocemir Lugon and Marcus Bastos, who managed to take the JBN to Medline ^®.

Medline is the National Library of Medicine, a database of medical journals since 1960, making available over 22 million references to papers in the biomedical and life sciences fields, dating back to 1946.¹ It includes citations from over 5,600 journals published worldwide. To be accepted to Medline, the journal must be submitted to a committee at the National Institute of Health, which reviews and recommends the journal, taking into account the quality of the scientific content, including originality and content relevance for the global Medline audience.

Therefore, we have the responsibility to maintain the high scientific quality of our JBN.

Traditionally, the evaluation of a journal is made by its impact factor (IF), determined by the average number of citations a journal receives and the average number of times that journal's papers are cited in other papers.² In other words, the more often JBN papers are cited, the greater its impact factor. IF is calculated and published by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters. Currently, JBN has no impact factor, perhaps because we only started having visibility on 2011, or we have not applied to the inclusion of our journal.

However, SCImago Journal & Country Rank, which is a portal that includes scientific indicators for journals and countries, already monitors JBN's impact since 2011.³ In 2013, the corresponding to the ISI's Impact Factor was 0.58.

So while inserting JBN in Medline gives us worldwide exposure, we still have a long way to go.

The difficulty we face in improving our IF is that our researchers prefer to publish in journals with higher IF, as this is stimulated by CAPES and it adds points to the researcher.

It is time to join forces around this goal and waive benefits by publishing high scientific-value papers in the JBN.

As far as I know it, JBN is the only nephrology journal in Latin America indexed in Medline, except, perhaps, by an Argentinian Journal of Urology and Nephrology published by the Argentine Society of Urology.

JBN, serving as a recipient of Latin American publications, would be an alternative and it would certainly increase our IF.

In addition to investing in better scientific quality, there are several strategies suggested to increase our impact factor:⁴

1. Increase the number of papers submitted and, subsequently, grow in quality. The Editor may invite researchers to publish in the journal or organize supplement issues focused on a specific topic. Increase the number of submitted papers and, the editor may reject lower-quality papers. Papers with a higher potential for being cited can be published faster. Editorial Board members may be invited to publish review papers on some current hot topic. Review papers usually bring about many citations.

2. Increase the journal's visibility. There are many ways to do this. The most used formats of scientific information are abstracts and indexing services. Inform scientists working in the same field of a paper published that can be of interest to them; inform cited authors that they have been cited by papers in the journal. In addition, social media can promote the best papers: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.

3. Publish in open access mode. JBN is already an open access publication, i.e., there is no need to be a subscriber to have access to published papers. There is evidence that papers published in open access are cited more often than those in the subscription model. This is especially true in low-income countries, where researchers not always have access to literature in their field. Although open access will not increase citations in developed countries, it will certainly have greater impact on the rest of the world.

4. Editorial Board with good international impact.

5. Increase the number of authors from abroad, requesting papers by renowned scientists from all over the world.

6. Facilitate the finding of papers online. We must recognize the advantages of online publishing and the use of guest-platform and not only provide the paper in PDF format. With the growth of online content (639,000 GB of IP data every minute), finding the right topic became more difficult. Search engines depend on the content being easily classified and found through label readers (tags). Increasing metadata through DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) and ORCID IDs (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) allows content to be more easily digested by search engines and found by the user.⁵

We have adapted our Editorial Board (EB), meeting Scielo's requirements - which was the springboard for our inclusion in Medline: 25% of the editorial board members must come from other countries, and national members who assess the papers must have their own publications as a prerequisite to join the EB.

We still have issues to be resolved, such as the publication of a printed version of the JBN + online or online version only. This is highly relevant vis-à-vis printing costs and postal expenses. In this year of economic downturn, advertisements in the JBN virtually disappeared, forcing us to rethink the JBN's financing model.

Anyway, we have goals and a willingness to enlarge our JBN. Therefore, we are open to dialogue and suggestions. Together we will be strengthening Brazilian Nephrology.

REFERÊNCIAS

• ¹
  www.nlm.nih.gov PMID: 10611059
  » www.nlm.nih.gov
• ²
  www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/impact_factor
  » www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/impact_factor
• ³
  SJR. SCImago Journal & Country Rank [Accessed: Apr. 18, 2015]. Available from: http://www.scimagojr.com/ PMID: 25711224
  » http://www.scimagojr.com/
• ⁴
  www.opensicence.com/how-to-get-impact-factor
  » www.opensicence.com/how-to-get-impact-factor
• ⁵
  The DOI® System. DOI® Handbook Rank [Accessed: Dec. 18, 2014]. Available from: http://www.doi.org/index.html
  » http://www.doi.org/index.html

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Apr-Jun 2015

History

• Received
  29 Apr 2015
• Accepted
  20 May 2015