SciELO Brasil maintains world leadership among scientific publication portals

For the fourth consecutive year, the electronic library leads the Top Portals category of the Ranking Web of World Repositories, which measures visibility and online impact.

By Noêmia Lopes

Agência FAPESP – Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) Brasil has remained the leader in the Top Portals category of the latest edition of the Ranking Web of World Repositories, a position that it has held since 2011.

Updated twice per year since 2008 by Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC), the ranking lists free, open access portals of scientific information and highlights those that have greater visibility and online impact.

SciELO is a FAPESP’s program launched in 1998. The program is also supported by the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

“Throughout its 16-year history, SciELO Brasil has amassed a notable scientific collection, containing a good deal of the best science published in Brazil during this period. In addition, a continued first place in the ranking reflects the strength of the program, which engages in constant updating of its operating system to increasingly facilitate the visibility of the library and its contents,” said Abel Packer, director of the SciELO Program.

Packer considers visibility to be foremost among the indicators considered in determining the Top Portals ranking (calculated based on the number of external links that lead to each repository), and this feature is the strong point of the Brazilian collection.

“This means that SciELO has a large presence and reach on the Internet. Whenever a researcher seeks information, the library is available to provide help,” he said.

The ranking also considers the size (the number of indexed pages of collections present in Google searches), the number of articles identified as rich text files (files in formats such as PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, PS and EPS, also extracted from Google) and the number of recently published articles included in Google Scholar (a search engine for academic work). For each of these three indicators, SciELO Brasil came in second place, behind the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (larger size and more articles in Google Scholar) and Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal (more rich text files).

The general program portal – scielo.org, com, with its 14 collections of journals that compose the SciELO Network – came in 13th place in the general placement of Top Portals and in 6th place in the category of visibility. According to Packer, “this was another important highlight for us because the page serves as a portal for all of the specific collections.”

Of the 143 portals on the list, 16 others belong to the SciELO Network: Chile (8th place), Argentina (11th), Public Health (15th), Spain (17th), Mexico (20th), Cuba (27th), Peru (34th), South Africa (36th), Portugal (39th), Costa Rica (41st), Colombia (51st), Bolivia (59th), Venezuela (61st), Uruguay (63rd), Social Sciences (73rd) and Paraguay (86th).

International visibility

In terms of competition, Packer cites, for example, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure program, which attained first place in size and in the number of articles published on Google Scholar.

“Our concern is maintaining a leadership position on the issue of visibility. To do so, we have invested in the rapid publication of content – any delay means a loss of exposure time – and in the professionalization of Brazilian periodicals, to the extent that they follow the highest international standards,” he said.

The coordinating office of SciELO Brasil also systematically promotes the use of English in the publication of academic articles. “There are fields in which publishing in Portuguese is essential to ensure that the knowledge is communicated to Brazilian society. However, visibility and international performance are then sacrificed. That is why we encourage the internationalization of periodicals that have the wherewithal to do so as a result of their comprehensiveness, scope or objective,” said Packer.

The efforts undertaken to this end resulted in the fact that in 2012, over 50% of the articles in SciELO Brasil were in English (for more information, go to http://agencia.fapesp.br/en/18384).

“We still need domestic policies that support Brazilian periodicals in an ongoing and consistent manner so that they can fulfill their fundamental role in the development of Brazilian science and research,” said Packer.