Revista gaúcha de enfermagem: a path for the qualis

EDITORIAL

Revista gaúcha de enfermagem: a path for the qualis

Maria Da Graça Oliveira Crossetti

Philosophy in Nursing PhD, Associate Professor of the Graduate Program in Nursing of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Coordinator of the Editorial Board of Revista Gaúcha de Enfermagem, Porto Alegre, estate of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Revista Gaúcha de Enfermagem (RGE), throughout its history of more than three decades, has fulfilled its mission in the nursing scientific community in the national and international scenes. It is a landmark vehicle for the dissemination and publication of the scientific output of Graduate Programs in Southern Brazil, holding a prominent place among the nursing journals with high expression in our context. Thus the journal has been improving its work process in order to make available to researchers, in real time, the manuscripts of authors who chose it to socialize knowledge.

In attention to the important role it plays in the evaluation of UFRGS' Graduate Program in Nursing and of other universities' Graduate Programs, since the quality of journals related to these is an important item used by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Level Education Personnel (CAPES) in evaluations, different strategies and goals were established and adopted by the Council and Editorial Board of the journal seeking more efficiency and effectiveness for RGE, which has a B1 in the Qualis CAPES Periodicals evaluation.

Qualis Periodicals is a system of classification of Brazilian scientific journals, created by CAPES, which is structured in a set of procedures to classify these vehicles that disseminate the intellectual output of graduate programs with master's and doctoral degrees. This classification is through metrics that measure the quality of this production through the analysis of the quality of journals. Thus the evaluation of the quality of scientific research produced by faculty and students in graduate programs occurs indirectly, since the primary object of assessment, classification and stratification is the journal.

The growing development and projection of the Brazilian nursing science is a reality expressed in the journals that are entering or already present in databases accredited by the national and international scientific communities(1). This finding = was one of the primary determinants for the Nursing Area Coordination of CAPES, along with the Nursing Advisory Committee of Qualis Periodicals - CAPES 2008, based on data from 2004 to 2006, to perform studies to define the criteria for the classification of nursing periodicals. These resulted in six criteria used in the Qualis Periodicals evaluation of nursing journals, characterized by the adoption and development of bibliometric indicators calculated and disseminated by recognized national and international databases. They also resulted in seven layers of evaluation used in Qualis Periodicals. The bibliometric indicators adopted by CAPES-Nursing described in 2009's area document as criteria for stratification of the area and use of these in the evaluation of journals are^(1-5):

a) indexing base: SCOPUS preferential and specific databases of the nursing area;

b) ISI: Institute for Scientific Information is the database used in more specialized literature. Among the main criteria for indexing journals in the ISI are the frequency and impact of the journal, measured by the increase in citations of their articles in other journals;

c) impact factor (IF) is an instrument that determines the frequency of citation of an article as a way to evaluate and rank the journals indexed by ISI. The IF is published by the Journal Citation Report (JCR) in which information is organized in order to reveal the number of citations of articles published in itself and in other related articles indexed in the year referred.

d) h index (H) is the indicator of the SCOPUS database whose product is the SJR - SCImago Journal & Contry Rank, which publishes the SCImago index;

e) RIC: indicator of impact and consumption of indexed journals. It is calculated by the number of citations a journal receives, divided by the number of published articles. The CUIDEN database, coordinated by Fundación Index, has “CUIDEN” as its indicator, following the same principles of the H index⁽³⁾.

In this context Qualis Periodicals ranks journals according to the following stratification described in Table 1 below.

Table 1 - Click to enlarge

RGE over recent years has been continuously improving the communication with the nursing scientific community and the work process in order to expedite the submission, review, editing, publishing and dissemination of the journal in its print and online editions. In a continuing effort of the team responsible for RGE - Editorial Board, Editorial Council, Editors, Technical Team - we defined strategies and targets we called "paths to Qualis"(6) many of which have already been implemented, namely:

a) to index journals in the main international databases;

b) to demand scientific criticity and a relevant national and international impact of scientific articles, special attention to the systematic review.

c) to implement the evaluation of RGE's bibliometric indicators every six months;

d) to implement international standards for the publication of articles and to standardize the sections;

e) to create the position of Editor for nursing specialties;

f) to define the powers of the Editorial Board, Editors and Technical Team;

g) to balance the number of reviewers and editors with experience in quantitative and qualitative research;

h) to increase the number of reviewers in nursing with national and international importance;

i) to include the modality "short communication";

j) to maintain regular periodicity;

k) to have a Technical-Administrative Staff qualified in the assistance to the strategies and goals of RGE;

l) to have a qualified Administrative Board and Editorial Board;

m) to maintain peer review, including details of the review process;

n) to increase the number of authors to the limit of six per scientific article;

o) to hold monthly meetings with the Editorial Board, Editors and Technical Team;

p) to establish a flow chart of the articles from submission to publication.

The processing of scientific articles in the journal is described in the following Chart 1.

RGE's B1 Qualis evaluation and its indexing at the Scielo database in 2010 acknowledges its excellence as a journal disseminating knowledge produced in graduate programs and as a vehicle that publishes quality articles. It is noteworthy to point out that in 2008 the number of submissions was 951, in 2009, 461, in 2010, 783, and up to September 2011, 995 papers. These data show that the outlook is promising for RGE to better its Qualis Periodicals evaluation.

REFERENCES

• 1. Erdmann AL, Marziale MHP, Pedreira MLG, Lana FCF, Pagliuca LMF, Padilha MI, et al. A avaliação de periódicos científicos Qualis e a produção brasileira de artigos da área de enfermagem. Rev Latino-Am Enfermagem. 2009;17(3):120-7.
• ²
  Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior. Anexo III: critérios QUALIS Periódicos: área de avaliação Enfermagem 2007-2009. Brasília (DF); 2009.
• 3.Hirsch JE. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005;102(46):16569 72.
• 4. Tuleski S, Barroco SS. Classificação dos periódicos no Sistema Qualis da CAPES: a mudança dos critérios é urgente! Psicol Est. 2010;15(1):1-4.
• 5. Silva MR. Qualis 2011-2013: os três erres. Clinics. 2010;65(10):935-6.
• 6. Crossetti MGO. Mesa Redonda 4: periódicos nacionais e novo sistema Qualis/CAPES: que cenário temos em 2011? In: Anais da 31Ş Semana Científica do Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre; 2011 jul 4-8; Porto Alegre, Brasil. Porto Alegre: HCPA; 2011.

Revista gaúcha de enfermagem: caminho para o Qualis

Maria da Graça Oliveira Crossetti

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  09 Nov 2011
• Date of issue
  Sept 2011