Scientific magazines in Brazil continue to have low international impact

Little collaboration with researchers from other countries is one of the factors contributing to the low citation rate of Brazilian scientific articles, say specialists.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – The number of Brazilian scientific magazines found in international indices, such as Journal Citation Reports (JCR), has been increasing in recent years. Nevertheless, the impact factor (IF) – the average number of citations received by scientific articles published in periodicals – of these magazines remains low and has not yet reached the world average.

This finding, from JCR 2011, was reported by participants at the 3rd Performance Evaluation Seminar of Brazilian Periodicals, which was held in FAPESP’s auditorium this past September 27.

Sponsored by the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) – the result of a FAPESP-funded project – the objective of the event was to discuss the advances and challenges facing the development of high-quality Brazilian periodicals and to increase their international impact as reported in JCR.

Published in July, the latest edition of JCR, which has been updated with data for 2011, shows that significant advances have been made but reveals that the barriers and conditions that make it difficult to increase the impact of national periodicals persist.

Among the advances, it is worth highlighting the presence of two national periodicals, Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz e Clinics, with IFs greater than 2.

The number of Brazilian periodicals with an IF greater than 1 increased from 11 to 16. Nevertheless, the set of 111 indexed titles in JCR have a relatively low performance: the majority of titles continue to have below-average IFs in their thematic areas.

“The number of Brazilian periodicals in JCR increased 240% in the 2007-2010 period, climbing from 27 to 111,” comments Abel Packer, a member of the SciELO program coordination team. “But the average number of citations in 2011 dropped by 21% in comparison with 2010, falling from 0.520 to 0.509, which represents a sharp decline. There are various reasons for this decline, such as the fact that the indexed periodicals include periodicals that are relatively new on the international stage and are published primarily in Portuguese.”

According to the specialists present at the event, another factor that has contributed to the low international citation of Brazilian articles is the low participation of scientists from other countries in these studies.

Brazilian researchers published largely in national magazines, with 85% of Brazilian scientific articles having local affiliations – that is, most reports are by Brazilian researchers in Brazilian periodicals – without the participation of collaborating foreign scientists.

“We see that Brazil is the most national of all countries in terms of affiliation of articles. This represents a national heritage that, naturally, has its consequences,” states Packer.

According to Packer, the level of international collaboration is similar among articles published in national scientific magazines and varies between 6% and 8%. However, the presence of foreign authors as the sole author or in collaboration increases the number of citations.

A comparative analysis of the publication path of scientific articles in 12 countries – six developed nations (England, France, Canada, Holland, Switzerland and Spain) and six emerging nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and South Korea) – conducted by Rogerio Meneghini, scientific coordinator at SciELO, showed that articles resulting from international collaboration receive more citations on average than indigenous articles, based on the publications in Web of Science in 2010 and their citations through September 2012. The increase in citations is much higher when researchers from emerging nations collaborate with those in other nations than when researchers from developed countries collaborate..

In Brazil, the percentage increase in article citation as a result of international collaborations reached 97.8%, which is the second highest increase among emerging countries and is behind only Russia, which increased by 125%.

“The scientific collaboration process is more beneficial for emerging countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and South Korea. I believe that in all these countries, there is a quest to increase international scientific collaboration,” says Meneghini.

The importance of Brazilian periodicals

Yet according to specialists present at the event, emerging countries such as Brazil also use national periodicals as a tool to ensure that scientific results that might not receive space in international periodicals are disseminated.

Consequently, national periodicals must be improved to raise the level of Brazilian product as a whole. “Brazil publishes 29% of its indexed scientific product in national periodicals, compared to France’s 12%, for example. The presence of national periodicals is much greater and, therefore, requires policies and actions to make its impact more positive,” says Packer.

As a means of continuing to support the development of Brazilian scientific magazines, funding for the SciELO Program has been renewed, following good reviews of its results, according to FAPESP Scientific Director, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz.

“SciElo is a very important project for FAPESP. In 1997, when the program was created, open access was unheard of. Today, the whole world is talking about open access publications,” he says.

Currently, SciELO has 254 titles and registers an average of 1.06 million downloads daily, some 63% of which are PDFs and 37% of which are in HTML format.

At the end of July, FAPESP and the Thomson Reuters’ Intellectual Property and Science Division signed an agreement to integrate SciELO into the Web of Knowledge, the broadest international base of scientific information. “This should help scientific magazines that are on SciELO to have greater visibility,” says Brito Cruz.