This research is an exploratory and descriptive study that analyzes Brazilian scientific journals in the social sciences and humanities fields, indexed by SciELO database. The analysis was performed with 73 titles and mainly based on the criteria of extrinsic quality of journals related to: editorial entities, periodicity, duration, indexing databases, instructions to authors and criteria for articles evaluation. The results show that considering extrinsic aspects, these journals have improved significantly, and in terms of formal aspects are no longer so far apart from journals which have strong tradition of communicating scientific results in scholarly journals. However, it is essential to consider that there are still important aspects that need to be enhanced to allow these journals achieve a quantum leap even higher.
Scientific journals; Scientific journals in Social Sciences and Humanities; formal aspects; SciELO
