After a history of fifteen years, the Revista Brasileira de Saúde Materno Infantil (RBSMI), one of only three journals in the world with this focus and from the outset a peer reviewed publication- can only commemorate its continual evolution over this period, during which the number of manuscripts submitted has increased tenfold and the publication has been indexed in 15 international databases, including Scopus, SciELO, EBSCO and CABI’s Full-Text Repository. The mean publication time has also been reduced to six months and the H index currently stands at 14.
At the same time the Journal has invested heavily in improving its production mechanisms and editing and now uses the XML, ScholarOne, automatic DOI and Ithenticate anti-plagiarism systems. As is well known, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is an electronic format that facilitates the sharing of information over the Internet and speeds up the whole process of editing and distributing texts. The ScholarOne flow system, which covers the various steps in the editing process, from submission of manuscripts to publication of articles, has made an extremely useful contribution to the production of the Journal. DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which is a numerical identification system for digital content with the ability to access and locate material on the Web, in particular that published in periodicals with texts protected by copyright and others found in virtual libraries. This has helped to integrate the journal into the world system of scientific publications, facilitating full and immediate identification of its articles. Finally, the plagiarism detection system called Ithenticate is capable of integration with other content management systems and is currently of fundamental importance in identifying previously published material, thereby contributing enormously to the improving the ethical quality of the journal. It is capable of tracking the content of other manuscripts and can thus check for plagiarism, which is an important issue in present-day scientific communication.
All of this means that the Journal continues to renew itself and grow. This is a considerable achievement for a periodical published in the Northeast region of Brazil, which is known for its poverty and difficulty of access to financial support.
As it has achieved this growth and is aware of its potential, the Revista Brasileira de Saúde Materno Infantil realizes that it has now reached a point where it must make a further break through in terms of quality, its standing in the scientific community, its editorial performance and the expansion of its mission to promote studies of human health.
One serious challenge is posed by the huge rise in the number of scientific periodicals currently being produced, a phenomenon that has been widely observed and needs to be addressed seriously, since it increasingly limits the space available for communication. A number of initiatives are thus being embarked on and this would appear to be the appropriate time to do this, given the experience the journal has built up until now.
For all these reasons, we are pleased to inform our readers and collaborators of the changes that have already been established, which will be introduced in the coming year in the first issue of 2016. These changes are as follows:
- In keeping with the growing trend in current scientific journal publishing, the Journal will henceforth only publish articles online;
- Likewise, we will begin to publish articles only in English and Portuguese no longer publish those in Spanish as we have done up to now;
- Finally, we plan to lay more emphasis on our scope areas - pediatrics, gynecology and obstetrics - considering their clinical and surgical aspects, while continuing to publish studies in the fields of epidemiology and collective health, which we have focused on from the outset, to the point that we have recently achieved a rankhttp ing of B1 in collective health from the Qualis CAPES, the Journal Classification System of the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).
These are the three points in which we shall be investing heavily from now on. We thus invite our readers and collaborators to accompany this transformation, submitting manuscripts, especially in the fields mentioned here, which we shall be pleased to publish.
Finally, although the Journal may undergo some modifications in terms of the subject matter of articles published, it will continue to be a publication whose principal concern is women’s and child health, which are its ultimate objective.
We will thus continue to welcome the submission of manuscripts and maintain the technical and scientific rigor required for a journal that publishes studies of human health in this field.
We are fully aware that it will not be easy to meet the challenges that lie ahead. But we believe in the skill and competence our collaborators have hitherto shown in submitting articles of the highest scientific standards. We also have confidence in our own resilience, as shown by the achievements we have already made. Experience also tells us that this proposal is not unrealistic.
This is the aim that we shall henceforth be pursuing in collaboration with our contributors.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Oct-Dec 2015
