EDITORIAL
The internationalization of Cadernos de Saúde Pública/Reports in Public Health
The SciELO Program (Scientific Electronic Library Online, http://www.scielo.org) has recently celebrated ten years of work. Sponsored by the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP), the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq), and BIREME/PAHO/WHO, SciELO's objective is the indexation of Brazilian scientific journals with full-text articles and universal open access. More than serving as a repository of journal articles, the directory's goal can be considered that of a non-commercial publisher exercising control over the quality of the periodicals in its collection. The focus on evaluating the journals' characteristics does not involve any interference in their management. The SciELO approach draws on peer consultancies and scientometric and technical indicators, the results of which are available to the respective journal editors, allowing the latter to take the necessary measures to adjust to the required standards: a qualified editorial board, skilled ad hoc consultancy, a low degree of institutional or regional endogeny, punctuality and regularity, and other pertinent bibliometric attributes.
SciELO currently includes 473 journals from 12 Ibero-American countries and 1 Caribbean nation. It is the world's first open-access collection in the world as recorded by DOAJ (17%), followed by J-Stage of Japan (8.9%).
Very importantly, the SciELO methodology allows building a database of scientometric indicators that permits studies on science in the countries operating such bases, previously impossible. Most of the citations flow in this base is not available on the ISI-Thomson base. The two databases are thus complementary, allowing highly relevant studies (http://www.eventos.bvsalud.org/scielo10/?lang=pt).
Cadernos de Saúde Pública (CSP) joined the SciELO base early on, in July 1999. An important initiative by CSP was to include its own issues dating to before the journal joined SciELO (the CSP collection dates back to 1985). This fact and the journal's current monthly publication mean that CSP now has some 2,700 articles available, or 2.1% of all the articles in the international SciELO base. The CSP impact index in SciELO (considering citations by all SciELO journals) was 0.137 in 1999 and increased to 0.632 in 2006, or nearly a fivefold leap. It is fully plausible to assume that this increase was due to a synergy between the enhanced quality of the CSP articles and the expanded visibility provided by SciELO.
Another triumph by CSP is its recent indexation in the ISI-Thomson base. CSP now belongs to a select group of 26 Brazilian journals in this collection with a total of some 7 thousand titles. It is also important that CSP has joined the Scopus-Elsevier base, which includes some 17 thousand journals. This indexation has resulted from the recent decision by Scopus to join the SciELO evaluation, automatically incorporating its journals into its base. The resulting international visibility is priceless for CSP and the other journals in the SciELO public health collection. In fact, the citation rate can be expected to take a significant leap, since the eleven journals in the SciELO/public health collection will all be incorporated into Scopus, and their citations will automatically be incorporated into the base. To give readers an idea of the dimension, CSP had a total of 1,438 citations in all the SciELO journals in 2006. They will all be in the Scopus citations base, providing great international visibility, especially considering the growing number of full-text articles in English in CSP, in addition to its abstracts.
Rogerio Meneghini
Coordenação científica do SciELO, São Paulo, Brasil.
rogmeneg@bireme.br