Editorial
The publication of articles is an essential part of scientific research. However, to have an article published is not enough it is also necessary to make sure that the work is going to read by the biggest number of people ans also that it is cited in related publications. For this reason, most of the scientific journals work hard in order to get indexed by international scientific data bases, because it will certainly bring a bigger visibility and after that, more citations.
When we became Editors of the Revista Brasileira de Farmacognosia (Brazilian Journal of Pharmacognosy) in 2005, we immediately started to try to recover the lost indexations and get new ones. Now the journal is indexed in the following data bases: Chemical Abstracts (CA), International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA), Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstracts (MAPA), Natural Products Alert (NAPRALERT), Natural Products Updates (NPU) and CABI.
After the publication of the first issue of the Brazilian Journal of Pharmacognosy under our responsibility, in Mach 2005, we started the first contacts with two other important data bases, the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), which calculates and divulge the Impact Factor (IF) and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SCIELO), responsible for the data base of the Brazilian, Caribbean and Latin American periodicals. At the moment we are in probation period n both data bases.
We are sending every issue of the journal to the ISI as soon as they are published. We have been informed that for new periodicals like the Brazilian Journal of Pharmacognosy, the evaluation process takes about three years after the request, thus, it will only happen sometime in 2008, when the IF of 2007 will be published.
Regarding SCIELO, the criteria of evaluation for admission in their data base were told us in March 2005. Among the minimum requisites, the journal should be published at least quarterly, publish a minimum of 60 articles a year, and to be published at the specified times. Besides all the above, the journal should follow international rules of editorship (Informative title, correlation of the cited references, complete authors informations, peer review process, etc). As can be seen the adopted criteria are very rigorous as the SCIELO looks more for quality than quantity. Last December, when we published the fourth issue of volume 16, we reached all the above criteria. In January 2006, we requested our indexation process in the SCIELO. We have been informed that their Scientific Committee meets once a year, normally in the month of June. In July we have been told that the meeting was postponed for September. At the time we were finishing this issue we had not happened yet.
In conclusion, we have shown that the indexation to SCIELO and ISI is just a question of time. Some of the challenges of the past are still alive at the present, but they do not endanger the future, as can be demonstrated by the ever better quality of the articles published in the Brazilian Journal of Pharmacognosy.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
28 Jan 2008 -
Date of issue
Sept 2006
