Introduction
The cochlear implants centers in the world are studying the cochlear implantation in children with multiple handicaps.
Objective
To develop a questionnaire to analyze the subjective benefits of the cochlear implantation in multiple handicapped children according to their parent's perspective.
Methods
A questionnaire was applied to 14 families of multiple handicapped children, aging from 2–12 years old and having from 11 months to 11 years of implant use.
Results
The social-emotional abilities were improved because of many factors, such as: auditory exposure, which happened in 84% of the children; recognition of their own names, which increased in 56%; and development of eye contact, in 28% of the subjects. Other benefits appeared to be: music appreciation and more attention and adherence to other therapies and school activities. Besides, some children became interested in objects, playing with other children, and more adapted to daily routines. Thirty-five percent of the children acquired oral language, mainly the bilaterally implanted, while 14% of them were engaged in sign language. Although all of the children showed a significant improvement in communication, the emotional issues of some families and the severity of the handicaps negatively impacted the outcomes. In spite of the families' acknowledgement of some benefits, the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder caused frustration, requiring a readjustment of the expectations.
Conclusion
The questionnaire turned out to be an adequate tool to reveal the social-emotional benefits of cochlear implantation. Although oral language was not the major outcome in these cases, the cochlear implant benefits involved the whole family. All of the families recommended the implant to other children in a similar situation.
The challenge of increasing the impact of regional journals has received much attention. While funding and research agencies require the acceptance of papers from foreign authors as a means of increasing citations, Brazilian journal editors dispute the impact of this measure. This study aimed to evaluate, for Brazilian medical journals, whether the number of citations a document received was influenced by the authors' institutional affiliations or other predictive factors related to the paper or the journal. Sixty-one medical journals published in Brazil in 2012 were selected for analysis. SCImago and Scopus were used to extract the articles and their data. The number of citations a document received in 5 years was analyzed according to the authors' affiliations, language, document type, SCImago Cites per Document, and journal subject category. After adjusting for covariates by multivariate analysis, documents with collaborative international affiliations showed a citation increase of 0.17 (95% CI: 0.084-0.216) over documents by Brazilian authors. Significant increases in citations were also observed for bilingual documents (0.329; 95% CI: 0.236-0.380), English-only documents (0.159; 95% CI: 0.078-0.203), articles (1.590; 95% CI: 1.363-1.714), reviews (2.752; 95% CI: 2.355-2.972), and those under the subject category of hematology (1.280; 95% CI: 0.756-1.604). In summary, while collaborative international authorship increased citations in the investigated journals, language, type of document, and subject category had a stronger impact on the number of citations.
We are pleased to announce that the International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology (IAO) is now indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. ESCI is a multidisciplinary citation index that includes peer-reviewed journals that follow ethical publishing practices and meet the WoS' stringent technical requirements. 1,2 Inclusion in ESCI is an important milestone for the IAO. It enables authors and readers to follow and track the number of citations received by the WoS in real time (►Figs. 1-2).
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