Abstract

This is a reflection upon 17 years of experience in the production of an interdisciplinary scientific journal, the publication “Interface: Communication, Health, Education,” whose scope is in the fields of Collective (Public) Health, Education and Communication. It also examines retrospectively the themes published by the journal, seeking to identify them in different sections of this publication. Finally, the evolution of the journal is analyzed.

Key words
Public Health; Scientific communication; Social and human sciences in health; Health professional education

A little history…

[…] At this moment of transition and crisis, where scientific thought frees itself of certainty, Interface was born committed to dialogue, proposing a pluralistic space to ensure communication among diversity, without losing the perspective of a project of organization, construction and diffusion of knowledge. It arose as a borderline entity, socializing studies, debates and concrete experiences from different perspectives, motivated by the preoccupation of contributing to the questioning and understanding of pedagogical and communicational processes involved in the field of Health and constitute, more broadly, the everyday concerns of university and health services […]¹1 Apresentação dos editores. Interface (Botucatu) 1997; 1(1):5-5..

This paper presents a reflection upon the experience of creation and production of Interface - Communication, Health, Education, a journal gestated in a preparatory character since 1996, a year before officially circulating for the first time, in August 1997. In this manuscript, we also briefly analyze what we published over these 17 years of regular circulation in print and as electronic media. As we wrote at that time, in the presentation of the second issue, “a publication is always a certain intervention proposal for a ‘public space’: it generates and regenerates this ‘space’, its permanent and constitutive mobility”²2 Apresentação dos editores. Interface (Botucatu) 1998; 2(2):5-5.. So, in the retrospective gaze that here we undertake to examine the issues and topics discussed, what we see are the “images” of the questions and thought movement in the fields of its scope: the Collective Health (name of a modifed Brazilian Public Health), its relationship with Philosophy, the Social Sciences and the Humanities, Education, Communication and the Arts in Healthcare, as well as in the Education of health professionals.

Interface was conceived by an interdisciplinary study group dealing with Education and Communication related theme studies in the health field, in the UNI Project, funded by the Kellogg Foundation. This project selected Botucatu as one of locations for the development of this program in Latin America, with the partnership of the Faculty of Medicine at Botucatu, SP, (Unesp), and local community organizations. Thus, Interface was the result of that intense moment of creation and experimentation in integrating projects among the university, the community and the health services, the training in medical schools, as well as in Health graduate courses, involving other professions in this area³3 Cyrino APC, Cyrino EG. Integrando comunicação, saúde e educação: experiência do UNI-Botucatu. Interface (Botucatu) 1997; 1(1):157-168..

In the extended debate which took place within UNI Project, the production of a journal with the characteristics that Interface assumed was considered relevant, as there was no regular national or Latin American scientific journal which worked with this theme since one of the noted journals of that time, published by the Pan American Health Association, stopped circulating. So, after a year of hard work, some workshops and much discussion, the first issue of Interface was released at the Fifth Brazilian Congress of Collective Health, in August 1997, with good reception from the field.

The journal innovated introducing other languages in one of its sections – Creation - opening space for the publication of “reflective texts with more formal freedom, emphasizing iconographic, literary and poetical language, etc.⁴4 Normas de publicação. Interface (Botucatu) 1997; 1(1):5. Furthermore, the arts (especially the fine arts) were part of the journal's project from the first number, as an ongoing effort to construct a graphic-textual dialogue with its interdisciplinary: Communication, Health, Education. The selection of artistic expression, moreover, also sought to dialogue with the content of the texts themselves, following the editorial conception of each issue of Interface. It was considered that only scientific language alone would fail to recognize the complexity of the questions posed in this editorial project, which should be guided by the knowledge of the production based on the inherent sensibility of the arts, for, as Fernando Pessoa wrote, “all art is based on sensibility, and essentially, in sensibility”⁵5 Pessoa F. Arte e Sensibilidade. In: Carta a Miguel Torga, 1930. [acessado 2015 jan 10)]. Disponível em: http://www.citador.pt/textos/arte-e-sensibilidade-fernando -pessoa
http://www.citador.pt/textos/arte-e-sens... .

The presence of Maria Lucia Torales Pereira, as well as of Ricardo Rodrigues Teixeira on the team which conceived the journal – she an art educator and art researcher and he a sanitary doctor and student of the interfaces between Collective Health, Communication and Philosophy – was decisive for the proposal of this section. From 2009-2014, it had as editor Mariângela Quarentei- an occupational therapist and artist, dedicated to the issues of the “crossing over” between creative processes and the production of health.

It's important to note that, from the beginning, the journal's editorial team took over the ongoing challenge of seeking new interfaces and implications between different discourses, showing new relations between elements, such as: text and text, text and image, image and image. In a non-linear hypertextual conception of knowledge, it took into account technological advances. In this sense, the journal's project included, from the first editions, an electronic version.

When the first issue was published, the UNI Project had already become the Uni Foundation, and the journal was launched as a publication of this foundation. From the second issue on, the team could be characterized as a partnership between the UNI Communication Coordination and the pedagogical disciplines of the graduate courses of the Faculty of Medicine at Botucatu, Unesp.

Although this formal institutional configuration has been changing over these 17 years, the journal has had only small alterations of its editors and staff, interdisciplinary and interinstitutional in nature, which has been important for the progressive maturation of staff and strengthening of the journal.

Its scope was more explicitly defined in 2002, from the tenth issue on, oriented to the “articulation of Health Sciences with the Humanities, especially regarding Communication, Education and Higher Education”.

In 2004, the journal established a partnership between Unesp (through the Education and Communication Laboratory of Health, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine at Botucatu, and the Department of Education, Biosciences Institute at Botucatu) and the UNI Foundation. In 2005, upon completion of its eighth year of circulation, Interface was selected to integrate the SciELO Brazil library, which had a huge impact on the volume of submissions (Figure 1) and demanded a gradual internal reorganization of the journal to face the new challenges. The evolution of submissions in the following years, with a growth of about 500% in just three years, made Interface a good example of the importance of open access to “increase visibility” and in the “use and impact of indexed journals,” one of the primary objectives of SciELO⁶6 Packer A, Meneghini R. O SciELO aos 15 anos: raison d’être, avanços e desafios para o futuro. In: Packer A, Cop N, Luccisano A, Ramalho A, Spinak E, organizadores. SciELO - 15 Anos de Acesso Aberto: um estudo analítico sobre Acesso Aberto e comunicação científica: um estudo analítico sobre Acesso Aberto e comunicação científica. Paris: Unesco; 2014. p. 26-58..

This growth in submissions, and consequently, more approved papers, demanded an expansion of the periodicity of the journal to three editions per year in 2007, and every three months in 2008. In that year, Interface began utilizing an online submission and an editorial management system (SciELO Submission), which facilitated the flow, the merit-judging procedures and editing of each process, reducing management costs. A recent change to another editorial management system (ScholarOne Manuscripts) was guided by the search of specific features, especially, among others, one which permitted an improved search and evaluation of ad hoc reviewers⁷7 Cyrino AP, Schraiber LB, Foresti M. Interface: um projeto em movimento. Interface (Botucatu) 2013; 17(44):5-6., one of the greatest challenges of Brazilian scientific journals today: to quickly receive a qualifed evaluation⁸8 Artigo analisa a saturação dos revisores por pares. SciELO em Perspectiva. [acessado 2015 fev 5]. Disponível em: http://blog.SciELO.org/blog/2015/01/22/artigo-a-nalisa-a-saturacao-dos-revisores-por-pares/
http://blog.SciELO.org/blog/2015/01/22/a... .

In 2009, because of a reorientation of the UNI Foundation objectives, the journal became a publication of Unesp alone, through the aforementioned Education and Communication Laboratory in Health.

Based on the thematic analysis of the submissions received and the approved papers, as well as on the need to better define the scope of the journal for increasing visibility and delimiting its reading public and collaborators, starting in 2010 the journal began to be characterized as: “addressed to the Education and Communication in health practices, health professional education and Collective Health articulation with Philosophy, Social and Human Sciences.” So, its area no longer covered the Health Sciences and began to only cover Collective Health, with a preference for qualitative research.

In order to improve the management process and the editorial assessment of scientific merit, in 2011 a pre-evaluation stage was introduced and conducted by Editorial Board. It was established the following criteria for judging manuscripts: the appropriateness to the journal's scope. the minimum requirements of a scientific paper and the relevance and originality of its thematic and theoretical methodological approach. This also reduced the volume of papers in peer review and the time between submission and publication of the approved papers, bringing greater speed to the judgment of scientific merit. It also ensured a rapid response to the authors of rejected papers, which represented, at this stage, more than 50% of those submitted.

With the same aim of reducing the time between submission and publication of papers, in 2011 the pre-publication in the SciELO Library (ahead of print) of manuscripts already approved was introduced, enabling the rapid dissemination of papers in the scientific community, already with the allocation of a doi number, thus allowing for the immediate and correct record of citations received.

Up to the end of 2012, Interface kept both the printed and the electronic publication of their issues, when it was decided to end the printed publication, starting from issue number 44 (January-March, 2013), providing only the digital format version. This decision was the result of recognizing the current trend of scientific journals adopting the electronic version, as well as the pressing need to reduce costs. It was also acknowledged that the loss for readers would be small, due to the sharp changes in the way the scientific community currently relates to scientific journals: especially in the literature revue through search engines and databases at the expense of regular visits to the library to consult weekly journals, as was done in the not-so-distant past. However, for a journal born under the sign of graphic-textual dialogue, in which the visual arts still occupy a prominent place in the project, you cannot say that this change has been without any damage, no matter how much care is still present in the digital format version.

interface: a project in movement

In fact, no thinker, as well as no scientist, developed his thought or systematized his scientific knowledge without being questioned, challenged. Although this does not mean that every challenged man becomes a philosopher or a scientist, it means that challenge is fundamental to the construction of knowledge⁹9 Freire P. Extensão ou comunicação. São Paulo: Paz e Terra; 1992.

In August 1997, Interface-Communication, Health, Education brought the words of Paulo Freire, reproduced above, to grace its first issue. In this quote, the emphasis of questioning and challenge has accompanied us since the journal's creation.

Reviewing that first presentation, and, at the same time, conducting self-criticism of the evolutionary process through which the journal has passed, it is possible to assert that Interface has consolidated the initial idea of a moving project, inspired by Pierre Levy and Italo Calvino. “The first, bringing us the metaphor of the hypertext, of the knowledge as a way of building relationships and understanding of meaning in a heterogeneous network without center and in a permanent metamorphosis. Calvino offering us lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency as universal values to challenge the forms of communication of the next millennium, while reinforcing the idea of networking and knowledge as an open encyclopedia, and calls for the need of another form of knowledge which is marked by a more plural rationality, a more literary discourse and, above all, with the certainty that we are not personally separated from what we study”¹1 Apresentação dos editores. Interface (Botucatu) 1997; 1(1):5-5..

Keeping the thematic focus on issues of education and communication in health practices and issues of training and education at the university, the journal is always looking for new discursive articulations. The works which make up the different Interface issues express these articulations.

Focusing specifically on the interdisciplinary character of Interface, it is necessary to comparatively analyze the journal according to its different fields of interest.

Brazil has developed between the fields of Collective Health and Education, an interdisciplinary area that may be named Training and Education in Health. Interface is a journal with that interdisciplinary area in its scope and one of the few journals dedicated to the topic of health professionals’ education without an affiliation with professions or disciplines of knowledge, which is of considerable importance since various health professionals do not have a broadcast vehicle for reflection on teaching and learning in their area. In this regard and given the significant volume of submissions, Interface has prioritized for publication manuscripts with such an interdisciplinary profile.

In addition to the theme of Health Education, Interface stands out today as a journal in the field of Collective Health and is a reference in one of the areas which make up this interdisciplinary field: the Social Sciences and Humanities in Health, and has also included the dialogue between Collective Health and Philosophy.

The journal project includes an electronic version, as already mentioned, initially available, from the first editions. It has its own page on the internet, www.interface.org.br, and since 2004, also on SciELO Brazil. In 2012, the Interface website was completely redone, gaining a new design and features, allowing online access in the three languages in which Interface accepts submissions: Portuguese, English and Spanish. At the same time there began to be included a facsimile of the printed version of each issue published, allowing for reading directly on the screen or by downloading and use in different media, in addition to preserving the sense of taking care of the graphic-textual design of the journal.

Although the complete journal collection was already present on its website and on SciELO, with its content in html or pdf, this did not allow the reader to access the covers, the semantic networks (present in all issues and including the themes covered in each issue) and images, present only in the printed version. Beyond this content, readers can browse in some sections of the journal – Dossier, Debates, Interviews and Creation - exploring what was published throughout the collection. With this new website, Interface includes access to social media (Facebook, Twitter and its blog), recognizing the importance of these media in the dissemination of scientific knowledge¹⁰10 Estudo analisa o uso de redes sociais na avaliação do impacto científico. SciELO em Perspectiva. [acessado 2015 mar 18]. Disponível em: http://blog.SciELO.org/blog/2015/03/13/estudo-analisa-o-uso-de-redes-so-ciais-na-avaliacao-do-impacto-cientifico
http://blog.SciELO.org/blog/2015/03/13/e... .

In recent decades, due to constant and rapid changes in information and communication technologies, one of the growing challenges for scientific journals is to upgrade in the field of scientific communication, a sector dominated by large corporations and international publishers. This required renewal has had an impact on the publishing project: it has led to breakthroughs of a more conventional scientific perspective, guaranteeing Interface its permanence due to a good performance evaluation including stimulating productivity and internationalization; but it has also produced losses, in terms of original boldness in the interdisciplinary area, and in the desired languages, especially in terms of science dialoging with the arts. However, if for some time the Creation section was done by actively searching for collaborators and productions, it is currently receiving contributions through spontaneous submissions. The other sections have increasingly attracted manuscripts articulating the Art-Health connection.

This shifting process, from “printed on paper” to “digital format,” has also required a great updating effort from the editorial team and is a continuing challenge for professionalization of this group, requiring the addition of experts in scientific journalism to guarantee that the social media is effectively contemplated. Achieving these high limits of scientific journal professionalism has shown the limits of public financing in Brazil for the dissemination of knowledge produced by the scientific community.

collective Health, education and communication: a look at interface

In its 17 years of existence, Interface has published 757 articles, distributed among the

three main fields of its interdisciplinary scope - Communication, Health and Education-, respectively, with about 9.5%, 48.3% and 42.2% of the total, with significant links between them.

In the sphere of communication, the most common themes identified by keywords, representing 4.2% of the total, are: communication and its means; doctor-patient relationship; information and communication technology; networks; internet; media; narratives and art.

Collective Health presented as the most relevant themes, comprising 20.3% of the total: women's health, men's health, children's health, elderly health and aging; Family Health; health promotion; mental health; Brazilian Public Health System (SUS); Humanization of care; Care; Primary health care; Public Health; Health services; Health management; Health work; Professional practice; Popular education in health; Gender; Violence, including domestic violence, violence against women and sexual violence; Integrality and public policy.

In the field of Education, the following themes are represented: Education and theoretical models; Health education; Education of health care professionals and, in particular, medical education; Distance education; Permanent and continuing education; Preservice and Inservice education; graduation in health areas; Curriculum; Evaluation; Learning, including questioning, problem-based learning and meaningful learning; Skills; Teaching; Teacher Education; Higher Education. All together, these comprised 15.24% of the keywords of the manuscripts.

The Sections

Debates

The journal Interface, like other scientific journals, has maintained a Debates section since its inception, with the aim of presenting controversial issues, which give rise to discussions in the field. This section went from an initial format, with different authors dealing with the same subject, to the current one, in which three other researchers comment on a main text, followed by a comment from the author who opened the debate. This section has counted on the participation of young researchers in specific areas of knowledge, but also of established authors with extensive experience in the field, well known as those who built Collective Health in Brazil. The collaborators of this section are researchers from different subfields of Collective Health, such as: Policy Making, Planning and Management; Epidemiology and Social Sciences and Humanities in Health. It also included important international authors, whose works are mainly related to the theme of Education and Health, either as involved with university education or with training of human resources for health systems.

In addition, it can be seen that the journal has given voice to authors of different institutions, presenting those from the schools of Public Health, of Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry, Psychology, Communication, Education and Social Sciences. Foreign authors are represented, although in a much more limited number, by those from Argentina, Canada, Chile, Spain, Italy and Venezuela.

As for themes included, a survey however brief immediately shows us an interdisciplinary concern, as already given by the formation of the journal, constituted as an interface between three distinct fields of knowledge - Education, Health and Communication. Within these fields, the journal has expressed concern to bring to the public issues both newly initiated and controversial ones, including more conjunctural debates, such as classical themes, especially in cases of Collective Health and Education. Thus we see the lively debate on Family Health Strategy, or questions about the work of the community agent, with the hot debate about Popular Education or inter/transdisciplinary, root issues.

It is also possible to observe that the journal expands to include reflections of a philosophical nature of these themes. This is an interesting point to notice, as the very field of Collective Health, and even more traditionally the field of Education, already have a critical reflection from a philosophical point of view about their internal affairs, whether in research or in professional practice. Thus, opening space for this reflection was productive considering that although the philosophical approach in Collective Health has some accumulation of experience and knowledge, in contrast to its traditional presence in Education there are few spaces for publication that try to actively stimulate this type of production. In subjects such as Violence, Care and Humanization, there is a philosophical perspective that interconnects with more traditional trends in humanistic knowledge, represented by the strong and more structured presence in the field of Social Sciences, with themes sometimes regarding the cultural aspects of health practices, sometimes its social organization.

Finally, it is worth noting that the interface, itself, in which the journal is embedded, has in its formation the debate between the issues of Collective Health and Medicine, which is not restricted, as at first glance one could think, to the scope of educational questions. These include, of course, the preparing doctors in Collective Health content, particularly the Social Sciences and Health or Policy, Planning, Management and Evaluation. This content is, as a rule, foreign or at least unexpected. The debate about the Humanities in medical education allows for such an inclusion. Nevertheless, the discussion between the different points of view, which comprise Medicine and Collective Health, is not limited to the educational question. It is brought into the interior of health care practices by the theme of humanization, and the debates on the medical practice, and, in particular, in the relationship with the patient. So, if the reader may have thought a debate on Evidence-Based Medicine seemed daring as early as 2002, certainly this strangeness was better understood by the extensive list of more recent years around the issues of Humanization.

Open Space

If at least three explicit principles have marked the editorial line and the construction of the journal since its inception - interdisciplinarity, the appreciation of qualitative research and the concern to provide an appropriate space for research experiences or professional practices -this last aspect is what defines the Open Space section. In the editorial board words, this space houses “preliminary research notes, current controversial texts, relevant experience or information reports transmitted by electronic means.”

Without losing sight of its necessary scientific character, the journal intended to innovate and to connect reports of experience on the one hand, with the publication of papers in scientific language and, on the other hand, with the publication of content freer in form and more open to the arts in general, with the Creation section. Open Space walks between these poles.

The authors here are mostly affiliated with academic institutions, and are almost all Brazilian.

Among the topics discussed, there is a clear predominance of Collective Health, with the field of Education registering 25% of production, and about 10% of Communication. Note that within Collective Health, there are themes that relate to educational issues, but in this case, they are inscribed in the healthcare practices. What draws attention is the fact that about 10% of the production, in particular, revolves around the theme of humanization.

Throughout production, either by language or by themes, Open Space has fulfilled its objectives and has represented an important link between experience and scientific knowledge.

Creation

Since the first issue of Interface, the Creation section has opened space for compositions which explore the boundaries of academic texts while experiencing other languages without losing the quality and depth of reflection.

This section is connected to the journal's graphic project, carefully carried out in dialogue with the arts, which includes designing the cover, the production of a network of concepts which shape the themes covered in each issue and the graphic intervention in the texts, in addition to the blocks of images interspaced between articles published in print on paper, and currently, in its electronic facsimile.

The enthusiasm and investment of the journal creators with the Creation section has been, since its conception, related to the interdisciplinary character of this publishing project and the understanding that the complexity of the issues involved often demands other forms of expression and production of knowledge.

In addition to publishing innovative and, sometime, surprising texts, the very existence of the section in the journal always challenged the team of editors to define its scope and the type of article that would be published here. The process of creation has become part of the work of the team that, in seeking to make room for other forms of expression, ended up working flexibly, giving shape and a better definition for the section as the contributions of the authors arrived.

Over the past 17 years in this section, we have published poetry, literary and theatrical texts, critical essays on cinema, visual arts and theater, photo essays, drawings, paintings on canvas and body paintings, woodcuts, collages, sewing and embroidery, mosaics, self-portraits, exhibitions and shows, urban expedition records, architectural projects, performances and dance images, among others.

Through these different imaging and written compositions a great variety of themes have been treated: science crisis and crisis of representation, relations between science and art, health humanization, madness and creation, looks over the city and everyday concerns, vulnerabilities, body and corporality, art workshops, training and health education, health communication, contemporary lifestyles, love, loneliness, creative workshops, academic production and reflections on the writing process. The existence of this section also allowed space for the publication of texts that addressed the issue of the interface of art and health, a theme which is becoming stronger and occupying space in other sections of the journal.

In 2009, the Creation section team was expanded and assumed the proposal to design the journal's graphics in conjunction with the text published in the section. The transformation that occurred in 2013, when the journal became an exclusively electronic publication, and was received with regret by the creative team, who used to see the printed issue as an art object, in addition to an academic journal. However, the team soon realized that the digital format would bring new challenges and new possibilities. The section expanded experimentation in graphic production of texts, the use of colors and images, and also began to include video and audio content in its publications.

For its dimension of innovation and resistance in the editorial and scientific areas, the Creation section plays a key role in Interface, and remains as a differential and singular brand of the journal.

Interview and Dossier

Interview and Dossier are sections whose topics have been linked, since the first issue of Interface: Dossier (called Essays until 2002) is involved in the publication of text essays or thematic analytical papers, by invitation of the editors, resulting from studies and research; Interview publishes testimonies of people whose life stories or professional achievements are relevant to the areas of the journal coverage.

Taking a retrospective look at the themes published in these sections over these last 17 years, it is possible to observe the evolution of the scope of the journal, while, at the same time, confirming the identity of the initial project.

Generated in a context of crisis and transition at the end of the century, in which the university and, in particular, the health science schools began to question their education processes, Interface sought to participate, building a new space for discussion and reflection on the problems of the education and the practices which involved the field of health, enabling the production of knowledge that put together areas traditionally conceived within distinct epistemological and semantic fields.

In the early years of the journal, texts published in Dossier and Interviews predominately expressed concerns which permeated the teaching of health professions, especially the medical course, in a context of transition at the new millennium, to reflect on new paradigms for Education and health practices, discussion of ethics and human rights, curriculum reform, teaching methodology, epistemology, continuing education, inservice education, innovation, use of technology and autonomy. Such themes still show up in the latest issues, stimulated by inducing policies and widening the field of teaching for other health professions.

As the journal's scope consolidates as a publication of Collective Health, prioritizing studies involving qualitative research, the themes of the Dossier and Interview sections accompany this evolution of the editorial project with topics related to SUS, Family Health, Violence, Primary Health Care, the public versus private issue in the state, Social Networks, Care, and Qualitative Research.

Final thoughts: an evaluative perspective

After a long period of existence, such as our 17 years, a certain brief evaluation of advances and difficulties is necessary. These were years of major changes in the field of Collective Health: strong growth of graduate programs; proposition of undergraduate courses; greater autonomy of internal areas (Epidemiology, Social Sciences and Humanities in Health and Policy, Planning and Management), including the independence of conferences and special events; emergence of Science and Technology policies, with intensive research funding related to SUS; many social policies for SUS, above all, related to primary care, with a rapid substitution and obsolescence of proposals, which produced an important impact in the production of knowledge; rapid growth in the volume of professionals and field research participants, taking as an indicator the large number of people attending and presenting at conferences, etc.

All of this led both to the recognition of Collective Health as a scientific field, as well as to a progressively falls within the framework of such status. Likewise, dialectically, Collective Health creates tension in this framework through its interdisciplinary approach and criticism of the more traditional scientific culture.

In this context of rapid historical changes in this field, Interface is also seen, albeit in its own way, as a participant of this movement. The journal has gained good national visibility, if one considers the growth of submissions (Figure 1) in the last ten years. This evolution of submissions is due to several factors, such as the influence of indexes, the expansion of qualitative research in the field, and the growth, already mentioned, in the number of graduate programs in Collective Health, preparing more and more researchers. With the increasing volume of submissions, there has been a continued relative reduction of papers accepted for publication: 24% in 2007 to 7.5% in 2013. Such expansion of the field can be verified by the Brazilian production in Subarea Social Sciences (in Health), considering the citable papers published in Scopus basis, which went from the 18^th to the 5^th position between 2003 and 2013, while Collective Health (which includes Occupational Health and Environmental Health) went from the 12^th to the 6^th position. In the same period, utilizing the same criterion, Brazilian science as a whole went from the 17^th to the 13^th position. Interface is currently the twelfth leading scientific journal published in Portuguese, according to Google Scholar Metrics, based on the h5 index concerning papers published in the last five years¹¹11 Google Scholar Metrics. [acessado 2015 mar 18]. Disponível em: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view _op=top_venues&hl=pt-BR&vq=pt
https://scholar.google.com/citations?vie... . Also based on the h5 index, Interface is well positioned among Collective Health journals.

Still within the successful perspective of a scientific journal, considering the interdisciplinary character of Interface, it is important to point out its recognition in the different areas of its scope. To this end, we can take the Qualis-Journals, of Capes, with a reference of value assigned in each area of the journal, in which A1 is the maximum. Qualis A2 was conferred in the areas of Arts/Music, Interdisciplinarity, Education and Teaching, and B1 in Collective Health, Applied Social Sciences I (including communication), Anthropology and Sociology.

Interface interdisciplinary characteristic can also be analyzed comparatively, according to its different areas of interest, based on its performance in Scopus. In the area of Education (though its scope is only focusing on higher education: health professionals teaching), the journal stands out among the Latin American journals of this area. On this basis, among the 29 Latin American Journals of Education, Interface is one of those with the greatest impact according to different indicators (SJR, h-index, citation rate, etc.). The same is true in the area of communication, in which, among the six Latin American publications present in the Scopus base, Interface is the best performing in the above mentioned indicators.

Indeed, together with the good scientific indicators, the loss of printed publication - both by increased costs in the original proposal, as well as the new way readers and researchers relate to journals centered on digital communication -, called for root changes. Still, Interface sought to keep much of the original design and, as mentioned, with regard to the Art-Health link, if on the one hand there were loses, on the other this interdisciplinary perspective with the Arts led, over time, to require the publishers to actively search for collaborators and increasingly receive spontaneous contributions, working with iconography, imagery and literary devices.

References

Publication Dates

History