EDITORIAL
How to face this challenge
Brazilian journals seek in every way to improve their national and international performance, guided by CAPES-QUALIS assessments, uses as one of its criteria the impact factor measured by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).
The Brazilian Fruitculture Magazine (RBF), in the last evaluation by that committee, earned the grade B1 in Agricultural Sciences, where the impact factor rose from 0.295 (2009) to 0.440 (2010), 0,645 (2011) and our first A2 in Geography.
Those achievements encourage us to believe that we are on the right path and help us to propose another goal, besides our Portuguese version, we intend to present the English version on line in the Scielo. So during the XXIII Brazilian Congress of Fruit Crops, which is to be held from October 22nd to 26th 2012 in Bento Gonçalves, Rio Grande do Sul, we intend to present that and debate the different aspects that it is involved.
Another thing that is calling our attention is how to make the information reach the producers in a way that wake them up to new attitudes and efforts. To this end we have invited authors who had their studies published in the RBF to write further information on a journalistic way about their articles which would then be published on the electronic address www.todafruta.com.br, which is under our management, or on other related 'open access' websites.
Unfortunately we have received a low return of 10-15% and two troubling answers like:"Professor, I will not send, because I do not know how to write journalistically" or "Professor, I will not send, because my institution does not appreciate this kind of information".
Regardless of this we would like to report that we are trying to make the necessary adjustments to meet the producers' demands, since 2000 we started to introduce information in English about the fruit chosen on the RBF cover, in each of the RBF editions. Besides the fruit colored illustration in their natural conditions we give general information such as origin, major producers, productivity, main problems, destination of production etc.
For a brief evaluation of the results achieved with this innovation, we consulted www.scielo.br on the number of visits received by the articles published by RBF, which is shown in the table 1 below. In the first range the Mirtillo fruit appears with 24.471 visitors, in the 2008 edition overcoming editions of years before and after it.
With no speculation we would like to highlight that besides the production of a good article to be published, its diffusion deserves an extensive reflection at the Universities, research organizations and funding agencies etc.
Jaboticabal, June 30, 2012.
Carlos Ruggiero - Editor
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
17 Aug 2012 -
Date of issue
June 2012
