Psychology & Neuroscience increases its visibility through database indexing

EDITORIAL

^IPontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

^IIUniversidade Estácio de Sá, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

^IIIUniversidade de Brasília, Brasília, DF, Brazil

^IVUniversidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

Science is a social enterprise, and publication represents one of its main activities. Accordingly, scientific journals play an important role in the process of scientific development. The behavior of the editor of any successful journal is guided by two general goals: to assure the scientific quality of the papers and develop regular readers who will cite the content of these papers. Although both purposes are intimately related, they require different approaches by the editors. The quality of a paper is a consequence of an experienced editorial board and peer reviewers who can evaluate the manuscript before it is published. Psychology & Neuroscience has been very fortunate in this respect. It has a group of wonderfully talented Editorial Board members who volunteer their expertise and time to achieve this goal. Each paper is peer-reviewed by at least two experts. After its acceptance for publication, by the Editors, based on the opinion of the reviewers, the manuscript is copy-edited by a native English speaker with a high level of scientific writing skills.

The citations of the journal content depend on its accessibility and visibility in the scientific community worldwide. Psychology & Neuroscience adopts an open access policy. This means that anyone can have unrestricted online access to its full content. Several evidences indicate that open-access articles are cited more frequently due to its easy accessibility (Lawrence, 2001).

Journal´s visibility depends on specialized indexing databases. Therefore, Psychology & Neuroscience needs also to be present in searchable knowledge database accessed by a wide range of psychologists and neuroscientists, including clinicians, investigators, faculty members and students. This is not an easy task. Database indexing services have different, often stringent, criteria for journal acceptance. Most of these databases include a full evaluation of the journal content, with at least 2 years of continuous publication.

As we mentioned in our previous editorial (Landeira-Fernandez, Cruz, & Ventura, 2009), Psychology & Neuroscience could only apply for inclusion in these databases at the beginning of this year because of the young age of our journal. The journal evaluation process performed by these database companies often takes prolonged periods of time, but as we finish the publication of our third volume, we are delighted to announce that Psychology & Neuroscience has been accepted for indexing in important national and international databases, including SCOPUS, SciELO, LILACS, RedALyC, DOAJ, PSICODOC, CLASE, PEPSIC, LATINDEX, and Index Copernicus. This is very exciting news that confirms the continued and accelerating success of our journal. More than 1000 journals are published by Brazilian academic institutions or scientific societies. However, less than 5% of these journals have been indexed in appropriate literature databases (Meneghini, 2010). Therefore, Psychology & Neuroscience is becoming a part of a very prestigious group of journals that have widespread visibility.

Improving the visibility of Psychology & Neuroscience has immediate and future important implications. It demonstrates that our journal is maturing very fast. This has been recognized by the financial agency CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico), and we proudly announce that Psychology & Neuroscience has just been awarded financial support by the agency, joining thus the most highly regarded Brazilian publications. In addition, indexing might enhance the national evaluation performed by the QUALIS system of CAPES (Brazilian Federal Agency for the Improvement of Higher Education). According to the criteria used to evaluate scientific journals in psychology (Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde - Psicologia, 2010), Psychology & Neuroscience has already an A2 score profile on the A1, A2, B1, B2, B3, B4, and C scale.

Psychology & Neuroscience has taken a major step forward and is becoming an important vehicle for information exchange and dissemination. This will certainly drive the interest of more psychologists and neuroscientists from Brazil and other developing countries to publish their work in our journal and thus improve the information flow between developing and developed countries. Indeed, during the 3 years since its inception, Psychology & Neuroscience has published papers whose authors are from Latin America, Europe, India, Australia, Canada, and the United States.

A strong Brazilian journal that covers psychology and neuroscience follows a general national trend in which Brazil is the leading country in scientific publications in Latin America and ranks 13^th worldwide (Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, 2010). In fact, mental health is one of the main areas that show this pattern of increasing Brazilian scientific publications (Gerolin, Bressan, Pietrobo, & Mari, 2010).

Finally, we believe that as Psychology & Neuroscience gains its own identity, the distance that exists in Brazil and other Latin American countries between psychology and the neural sciences might lessen. As we stated in our first editorial (Landeira-Fernandez, Cruz, & Ventura, 2008), the main purpose of our journal is to improve the impact of neuroscientific knowledge in psychological education. With regard to the official impact factor of Psychology & Neuroscience, we still must wait a little longer. Although SCOPUS now also has an impact factor calculated independently, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is still the world's leader in tracking the impact of scientific research using citation statistics. Currently, Psychology & Neuroscience is being evaluated by ISI, MEDLINE/PubMed, and PychINFO. We are very optimistic about our future prospects. We foresee that this coming year will bring the same success as we have had this year. The progress accomplished during this period is largely attributable to our readers, reviewers, and authors who trusted their manuscripts to Psychology & Neuroscience. We are very thankful for your support.

• Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde & Psicologia (2010). Critério do qualis periódico: área de psicologia. (http://www.psi.bvs.br/php/level.php?lang=pt&component=19&item=43; accessed December 7, 2010).
• Landeira-Fernandez, J., Cruz, A.P.M., & Ventura, D.F. (2008). Psychology & Neuroscience: the birth of a new journal (editorial). Psychology and Neuroscience, 1, 1-2.
• Landeira-Fernandez, J., Cruz, A.P.M., & Ventura, D.F. (2009). Psychology & Neuroscience celebrates its first anniversary (editorial). Psychogy and Neuroscience, 2, 1-2.
• Lawrence, S. (2001). Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact. Nature, 411, 521.
• Meneghini, R (2010), Publication in a Brazilian journal by Brazilian scientists whose papers have international impact. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, 43, 812-815.
• Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia (2010). Países com maior participação percentual em relação ao total mundial de artigos publicados em periódicos científicos indexados pela Thomson/ISI, 2009. (http://acessibilidade.mct.gov.br/index.php/content/view/2078 html; accessed December 7, 2010).

Psychology & Neuroscience increases its visibility through database indexing

J. Landeira-Fernandez^{I, II}; A. Pedro Mello Cruz^III; Dora F. Ventura^IV

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  21 Mar 2011
• Date of issue
  Dec 2010