The challenges and results of 29 years of publication of Acta Paulista de Enfermagem

The Editorial published by Acta Paulista de Enfermagem (APE) in 1988 expressed its purpose of being a strong and dynamic journal for Brazilian nurses to publish their scientific manuscripts. Along the years, APE began to publish contributions to the health field as well. When APE completed 17 years of age, it assumed the mission of improving the publication of scientific quality articles thus favoring professional education.(¹) In the beginning of the XXI century, APE has assumed the demands of indexed globalization, highlighting the SciELO collection and the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), SCIMAGO, and SCOPUS databases.(²) In addition, APE has innovated in order to meet the urgent need to publish exclusively in the digital version, with a high demand for submissions, aiming to achieve a greater audience, visibility, publication speed, and universal free access. The digital form of APE made possible to provide both ahead-of-print publication and interactivity among authors.(³)

In 2013, the editorial project of APE was to be among the best nursing journals in the world. With this challenge, APE has professionalized its editorial office and adopted the ScholarOne, an international reference system, which allows authors to submit their manuscripts online and follow the flow of reviews by the editor-in-chief, associated editors, and ad-hoc reviewers. Thus, the layout of articles began to be arranged in the editorial office where the smart labeling in the XML format was adopted, as required by the PubMed Central.(⁴) The APE also adopted a policy of awareness and information about intellectual property, with specific procedures to avoid plagiarism practices. The purpose of this policy is to inform authors about acceptable writing practices, thus defining a quality standard for publication of peer-reviewed articles. Thus, APE began to be considered a rising journal, under stringent quality criteria in the scientific, technical, and administrative areas.

Thus, APE completed 25 years of life, with the following quality criteria: i. open acess, ii. App available for iPad (in Portuguese and English), iii. support from Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) and the Brazilian Council for Science and Technology (CNPq); iv. editorial board composed of researchers from Brazil and abroad; v. indexation in national and international databases (including Web of Science, ISI, SCOPUS, CUIDEN, CINAHL, SciELO, and LILACS); and vi. classification in the QUALIS/CAPES index (stratum A2), which is used to evaluate the academic graduate programs.(⁵)

As the editor-in-chief of APE, I am privileged to make a historical clip of the Editorials of my predecessors. Some previous decisions allowed APE, a technical-scientific electronic publication of Escola Paulista de Enfermagem (EPE, UNIFESP), to come to be a rising scientific journal, with multimedia interface. Once more, APE has innovated with a necessary change to keep trying to be among prominent journals in the nursing and health areas of the national and international scenarios. In 2015, APE was submitted to evaluation by PubMed Central (National Institute of Health, NIH, and National Library of Medicine, NLM), and later by MedLine, aiming at both its indexation in these important data networks of the health area in the world and availability in the open-access text bases of the biomedical and life sciences. Finally, APE has joined the RevEnf Portal as a strategy to strengthen the scientific nursing journals published in Brazil.

Janine Schirmer
Editor-in-Chief of Acta Paulista de Enfermagem

• ¹
  Editorial. Acta Paul Enferm. 2005; 18(2):123-4.
• ²
  Barros AL. A Acta Paulista de Enfermagem no programa SciELO. Acta Paul Enferm. 2007; 20(1):v.
• ³
  Barbosa DA, Belasco A, Vianna LA. Acta Paulista de Enfermagem em suporte digital: registro de um marco na história. Acta Paul Enferm. 2012; 25(1): i.
• ⁴
  Editorial. Acta Paul Enferm. 2013; 26(1): i.
• ⁵
  Adami NP. Editorial. Acta Paul Enferm. 2013; 26(4):vi-vi.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Feb 2016