EDITOR'S NOTE
Dear reader,
As we wrap up each issue, one of the last things we do is prepare a summary of its contents for this note. This time, however, we're going to use the space to bring you some great news: História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos has been invited to be indexed in a bibliographic database of the Thomson Reuters Corporation, owner of the former Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) services and one of the world's most prestigious indexers of scientific periodicals.
Founded in 1955 by the chemist Eugene Garfield, with head offices in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the ISI was bought by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992; it was first renamed Thomson ISI and then, later, Thomson Scientific. Following the April 2008 merger of Thomson Scientific and Reuters news agency, Thomson Scientific became part of the new Thomson Reuters Corporation. With the expansion, more information services were offered, like the ISI Web of Knowledge, a research platform that provides tools for analyzing data from different sources, such as periodical articles, patents, internet sites, conference annals, and open access documents.
The new company maintained and improved two of its best-known products: the Journal Citation Reports - which calculates the world's most widely used measure of scientific production, the impact factor - and the Web of Science, comprising the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. References to the full content of our journal will now be included in the latter index starting with our 2008 issues.
The portal to Web of Knowledge products and services can be accessed at http://isiwebofknowledge.com/, where you will find the names of journals indexed on Web of Science databases, along with the criteria used in selecting journals for inclusion. Capes Portal users can access the following ISI Web of Knowledge products: Web of Science (from 1945), Journal Citation Reports (2005-2006), Derwent Innovations Index (from 1963), and information analysis tools like Science Watch, ISI Highly-Cited.com, and others.
Increasingly more sophisticated and specializing in ever more areas of knowledge, periodical indexes are now true companies, whether public or private, devoted to product diversification. They play a prime role in the dissemination of scientific information in our contemporary society and are gradually taking on new responsibilities. For example, they may offer services like evaluation of the performance of both journals and scientists, based on reading indexes and citations of published articles.
Some indexes carry something of the status of a brand name, lending prestige to the journals they select for indexing.
The ISI was the first to offer its subscribers information on the performance and impact of articles in various arenas of knowledge. Similar resources are available through Elsevier's Scopus, another major database on scientific literature, which also references our journal. The SciELO portal itself is no longer just a virtual library of scientific periodicals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Portugal, and Spain, since it too now produces statistics on the most cited articles in its collections, the most accessed articles and journals, co-authorship, and so on. The impact factors and H-indexes that help research agencies and science institutions to evaluate authors and periodicals are drawn from this information.
For some years now, all content published in História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos has been processed by a number of indexes of scientific journals in Brazil and abroad. Since June 2006, the magazine has been indexed by Medline, the world's largest online database of medical literature, with free access. It contains some 9,000,000 bibliographic references from 4,500 journals published since 1966 in over seventy countries.
We have now reached the ISI Web of Knowledge - in the company of the crème de la crème. Nice, isn't it? The credit goes first and foremost to the authors who have been published in História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos, as well as to the members of our Editorial Board and ad hoc consultants, who give of their precious time to provide peer reviews. Nor would we have come this far were it not for the invaluable support of SciELO and your steadfast support as well, dear reader.
The good news announced in these pages testifies to the merit and maturity of an area of knowlege we have helped to leverage. May good winds carry it to even greater heights! That is our wish for 2009, a year that has gotten off to a truly auspicious start.
Jaime Benchimol
Ruth B. Martins
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
24 Mar 2009 -
Date of issue
Mar 2009
