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We have arrived at MEDLINE, whither now?

EDITORS NOTE

We have arrived at MEDLINE, whither now?

Rodrigo A Bressan; Euripedes C Miguel; Jair J Mari; Luiz Augusto Rohde; Marcos T Mercadante

Editors

Since 2003, the publications of Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria (RBP) – Official Journal of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association have been indexed in Index Medicus®/MEDLINE®. All scientific articles (originals, updates, reviews, and supplements), editorials, and letters to the editor can be accessed all over the world on the Internet. Free search engines such as PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed) allow the access to the references of RBP's publications, which, in turn, are the gateway for SciELO Brazil's (Scientific Electronic Library Online) icon. Through this icon it is possible to obtain the full text of RBP's publications and to print them.

This world wide availability enabled RBP to reach two of its main goals. It allows universal access, including health professionals, lay people, patients and family members all over Brazil, democratizing the knowledge and collaborating with the improvement of the country's mental health practices. It also increases the visibility of the mental health Brazilian scientific production to international researchers. Any bibliographic review performed through the search engines will include the articles published on RBP, divulging internationally our production. Besides, being indexed in Index Medicus®/MEDLINE®, RBP is now qualified no more as a National, but as an Internacional (Internacional C) journal, according to the evaluation criteria of CAPES (the official agency in charge of the country's postgraduate courses). Therefore, RBP became a more attractive vehicle for the publication of national and international quality researches, what has already been noted by the great increase in the number of articles that RBP has received since then.

The indexation in Index Medicus®/MEDLINE® has been an extremely important step, but it is not our final goal. Our next objective is to achieve the evaluation Internacional A of CAPES. To achieve that, it is necessary the indexation in the Science Citation Index of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), the agency which assesses the impact factor of scientific journals. The indexation in ISI would upgrade the journal ranking to Internacional B or A when the RBP's impact factor be higher than 1.

In order to achieve these objectives several new measures are being implemented. The case reports section, for instance, had its format changed. Isolated cases will be published as letters to the editor. Hermano Tavares will be in charge of this section, aiming to foster the publication of more articles. Similarly, from now on the articles of the memory section will be divulged as letters. During all these years, this section of the journal has been coordinated by Paulo Dalgalarrondo who did a great job, collecting excellent informative articles about our psychiatric history. We want to register the editors' acknowledgements to him, hoping to keep his invaluable help, now as a member of the editorial body.

Other great change is regarding the way of publishing RBP, which from this date will be issued in Portuguese and in English. In order to meet an old requisition of its members, the Brazilian Psychiatric Association (ABP) has decided to invest the necessary resources to translate all RBP articles. Therefore, from this issue onwards the paper version of the journal will contain only articles in Portuguese and the online version (SciELO) will be published in English. SciELO announces that in a little time period the online edition of both versions (Portuguese and English) will be available. With these changes, the foreign language barrier will be no longer a problem for all those who access the information contained in RBP.

We also want to increase the efficiency of the paper evaluation system aiming to shorten the time between submission and approval. In order to expedite this system we are already requesting that all submissions be sent by email (more details in the instructions for authors section). In 2004, we are going to use information technology for all the process of article submission and evaluation. In order to improve the reviewing system, were are doing an active recruitment of new qualified and motivated reviewers.

Therefore, we want to thank the researchers who have trusted their excellent articles to our journal. With their support and of those who would mention the qualified articles published by RBP we believe that we are ready for the next step: to know our impact factor as measured by ISI. The results will be collected in the next two years. Considering all that we have achieved up to now together with the scientific community, we think we will able to reach this objective.

Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    30 Mar 2004
  • Date of issue
    Mar 2004
Associação Brasileira de Psiquiatria Rua Pedro de Toledo, 967 - casa 1, 04039-032 São Paulo SP Brazil, Tel.: +55 11 5081-6799, Fax: +55 11 3384-6799, Fax: +55 11 5579-6210 - São Paulo - SP - Brazil
E-mail: editorial@abp.org.br