Our journal will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2019. A notable achievement for a Brazilian and Latin American periodical that in recent years has been forced to adapt in response to a challenging political context for scientific research. Jaime Benchimol, who served as its editor for 18 years, set the course that we have striven to maintain as its scientific editors since March 2015. At our editorial board meeting in early December 2017, we reflected on the progress made so far and the hurdles still to be overcome. These are the subjects we would like to share with our readers in this letter.
The first achievement worth highlighting is the significant rise in the number of submissions, mostly from researchers affiliated to universities in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain. Also on the up is the number of proposals for special issues or dossiers and the number of articles translated into English, enabling wider international impacts. Secondly, our use of the online submissions platform ScholarOne Manuscripts has helped to take better advantage of referees’ comments, to make properly substantiated decisions, and to speed the whole publication process, considerably reducing the time lag between approval and publication. Our third accomplishment has to do with the rankings published on the Scimago Journal & Country Rank portal, based on the Scopus database (from Elsevier), where História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos was ranked higher than the other Latin American publications in the History and Philosophy of Science category in 2016 (based on its impact, number of citable documents, and number of cites). Fourthly, in the latest four-year evaluation (2013-2016) of journals by the Brazilian government's graduate education and research agency, Capes, História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos was awarded the top grade (A1) in the areas of History (its core identity), Sociology, Interdisciplinarity, and Education, as we commented in the last letter.
Alongside all this progress and improved transparency in the receipt, processing, approval, and publication of articles, one of the key changes in recent years has been our social media presence. Since our social media debut in 2013, we have consistently featured content related to each new issue in our national and international blogs (www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br and www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br/english). The postings include interviews with our authors, brief analyses of significant academic events, and news on subjects related to the published articles. Everything that appears in the blog is also referenced on Twitter (twitter. com/revistahcsm) and our two Facebook pages (www.facebook.com/RevistaHCSM and www.facebook.com/JournalHCSM).
One important piece of news is our recent decision to open up space in our pages for articles that make broad historiographical reviews of sub-areas of history and related subjects, with the potential to spark meaningful debate between researchers. In 2017, after consulting our assistant editors, we introduced a new section in the journal, called Historiographical Review. The first ever contribution to this section was the excellent article by Nelson Sanjad (2017SANJAD, Nelson. Exposições internacionais: uma abordagem historiográfica a partir da América Latina. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, v.24, n.3, p.785-826. 2017.) on "International Expositions: a historiographic approach from Latin America,” which came out in the September 2017 issue. Our hope is that contributions to this section will provide our readers with wide-ranging, in-depth perspectives on what has already been published and what still needs further investigation. We also hope they will be adopted as key educational resources for graduate students.
Our plans for the future include putting on a range of activities to celebrate our 25th anniversary (in 2019), boosting our presence in the international community, improving our editorial team, and guaranteeing our financial sustainability. This means giving the journal a more attractive visual identity and making it more interactive, through audio and video content. We also want to keep better track of the real impact our publication is having in Brazil and abroad. As part of our celebrations, we are planning an international conference on the challenges inherent to the scientific editing of periodicals in the humanities, where editors, academics, and students will be able to exchange information and experiences and discuss the most pressing and controversial issues in Latin America, raising awareness amongst academic authorities and the general public as to the importance of journals for the development and consolidation of scientific communities.
Turning to the issues we face, we need to respond more effectively to challenges like the paradox of the internationalization of Brazilian periodicals: a notable increase in the number of foreign authors submitting papers for publication, yet little change in the number of citations in foreign journals. We must also value the voluntary contributions of our referees and the authors of our reviews for taking on tasks that many researchers eschew. The work of referees is critical not only for the journal, but also for our dialogue with the scientific community and for improving the quality of the published articles. Another salient issue is our engagement with the academic Latin of our day: English. We want to be able to offer content in two languages (Portuguese and English or Spanish and English) that is relevant and has an impact in Brazil, the rest of Latin America, and other parts of the world, but we know that not everything we publish is suitable for translation, and that translation cannot be taken as a synonym for internationalization.
Above all, we must play our part, alongside researchers, journals, and institutions, in the staunch defense of the valuable space for academic inquiry opened up in recent years in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Space that is under constant threat from short-sighted politicians doggedly committed to ideologies that do nothing to build science or nations.
We are confident that besides showing that quality historical research is possible and necessary in Brazil, the articles in this first issue of 2018 also demonstrate that more research in science and public health is needed if this is to become a truly democratic, socially equitable country. And so we look forward to the 2019 conference in the hope that we can declare: História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos, here's to the next 25 years!
Referência
- SANJAD, Nelson. Exposições internacionais: uma abordagem historiográfica a partir da América Latina. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, v.24, n.3, p.785-826. 2017.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jan-Mar 2018
