Facilitation of scientific initiation research in undergraduate medical school - understanding different acronyms and abbreviations

Abstract

We read with great interest the article by Souza et al. 1 on research programs for undergraduate students. A discipline of Scientific Initiation (SI) started to be offered at our university in 1995 2 , for Undergraduate Research, but this year it became mandatory in all semesters.And we are faced with frequent doubts among students, related to the lack of knowledge of the meaning of the different acronyms and abbreviations used in scientific research, and based on this finding, we began the study of these items used in relation to research, publication of articles, books, book chapters and some terms in English. Surely, some acronyms or names are easy to understand such as Google Scholar, Google Books and PUBMED, and are of common use in our academic environment such as ABNT, CAPES, CNPQ, DOI and QUALIS. However, without having the correct understanding in some cases, such as LILACS, MEDLINE, SciELO and SCOPUS, which can lead to misunderstanding, while others use a miscellany of letters that often surprise the