Internationalizing a prestigious Brazilian scientific journalEDITORIAL
Internationalizing a prestigious Brazilian scientific journal
Emerging countries have been making a great effort to increase the presence of their scientific journals in the international bases of scientific publications.
Brazil stands out for having increased the number of journals in the Web of Science by approximately 8 times since the beginning of this century: nowadays we have about 140 journals online.
But it is very interesting that, when compared with other emerging countries, there are few Brazilian journals covering the exact sciences area.
This is so partly because of the historical profile of the Brazilian science, when compared with that of China, India and Russia, for example, in which the exact area and engineering are dominant.
Perhaps influenced by the emphasis given to the tropical medicine at the beginning of the twentieth century, the profile of the Brazilian science resembles more that of the developed countries, with a predominance of the biology and biomedical areas.
As a consequence, Brazilian chemists, physicists and mathematicians submit the great majority of their articles to international journals.
In the chemistry area, two journals, both published by the Brazilian Society of Chemistry, stand out: the Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society JBCS and Química Nova.
The JBCS is in its twenty-fifth year of activity and its international visibility has been increasing remarkably. In 2001, the Web of Science registered 250 citations from its articles.
In 2013, 3500 citations were recorded. In the same database, 50 articles of the JBCS received over 40 citations.
Among the 140 Brazilian journals indexed in the Web of Science, in 2012, the JBCS was the first placed in number of articles quoting articles published by the JBCS in 2010 and 2011: a total of 618 quoting articles. Even more impressive is the number of foreign authors' quoting articles in this same period: 337, which means the second position among all Brazilian journals.
However, if the point of interest is the international visibility of the journals, more interesting than quoting countries is the statistics of foreign countries publishing in Brazilian journals. In 2010 and 2011, the JBCS published 203 articles by authors from 34 foreign countries with no Brazilian co-authorship, that is, one-third of all JBCS' publications in those two years.
It is true that the majority of those 34 countries is emerging or developing. However, equally important is the fact that, in 2000 and 2001, the number of articles by foreign authors was 12 times smaller.
No doubt, JBCS has conditions to become a true international journal. No other Brazilian journal has such active involvement on the part of Brazilian authors recognized as the most prominent in their knowledge field and who also publish intensively in high quality international journals.
An initiative to boost the internationalization of the JBCS would be to hire an internationally renowned researcher, who co-works with the main Brazilian editors and who could, out of his prestige, convince international ad hoc advisors of reviewing submitted manuscripts.
Rogerio Meneghini
SciELO Program Cientific Director
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
30 May 2014 -
Date of issue
May 2014
