It has been a few months since I completed my term as Editor-in-Chief of the Brazilian Journal of Pulmonology (BJP), and it is great to be able to write about those four years, especially as our Journal completes its 40th year in publication.
In Brazil, being the editor of a scientific journal is an additional task to juggle, along with academic or health care activities. I remember the conversations I had, before my editorship, with the President of the Brazilian Thoracic Association (BTA)-Roberto Stirbulov-and with the Editor who preceded me-José Baddini Martinez. I was reluctant, because I was well aware of the huge workload and, especially, of the enormous responsibility that I would have going forward.
In my first Editorial, I emphasized the fundamental work of those who had preceded me, who had succeeded in getting the BJP indexed for the major international databases. I also emphasized how important it was that we (university professors and other health professionals in the field of respiratory medicine), work together to improve the scientific quality of our Journal, in order to gain more respect at the national and international level. I committed myself to leading this mission.
Between 2011 and 2015, the BJP experienced two contrasting occurrences. First, in June of 2012, the Journal received its first impact factor from Journal Citation Reports (JCR), an Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge database, and this was greatly celebrated. We had been monitoring the performance of the BJP in other databases, especially Scopus, which has its own metric (SCImago Journal Rank), and we expected to fare well in the ranking. In fact, the result was highly positive, placing us in a prominent position among Brazilian scientific journals (the BJP ranked third among medical journals) and in an admirable intermediate position among all respiratory journals worldwide.
In 2013, however, the BJP was excluded from the JCR list. The argument was that we had received an anomalously large number of citations in an article published in another Brazilian journal, which could artificially inflate our impact factor. That was a time of great tension. Our (temporary) exclusion led to a series of measures being taken by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES, Office for the Advancement of Higher Education), the agency that evaluates graduate programs in Brazil, and this negatively impacted its tri-annual evaluation of several of our programs. What discomforted me greatly, and even made me a little angry, was that CAPES did not allow any of the editors of the journals that were excluded from that list an opportunity to present their side of the story. The BJP was unilaterally excluded from the CAPES journal ranking system (known as Qualis), despite the fact that it has been indexed for all other major scientific journal databases for all these years, that it continues to be indexed for the ISI database, that its published articles continue to be cited, that its citations continue to be computed, etc.
In the following year, the BJP was once more listed in JCR with an impact factor that remained among the highest in Brazil: the sixth highest among the 107 Brazilian journals indexed for the ISI database. However, because of the mechanism by which impact factors are calculated, ours will, over at least the next two years, continue to reflect the effects of the fact that we were penalized.
Finally, I would like to call attention to achievements that also took place in 2014. First, the BJP became available on PubMed Central (PMC), which is a free, full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine. Second, we began using the ScholarOne system of manuscript management, which is an agile platform for authors, reviewers, and editors. This was key to increasing the presence of the BJP on the international stage, as well as increasing our appeal to international authors and reviewers.
Those were four years of hard work and of mishaps that could only be overcome with the unconditional support of the BTA Board of Directors, as well as that of the Executive and Associate Editors of the BJP. Those were also years of victories-years that demonstrated the importance of having a Brazilian scientific journal, of international scope, via which to disseminate our work and earn the respect of researchers worldwide.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Sep-Oct 2015
