A Special year for the AABC

Abstract

This is a very important year for the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências (AABC). Since 1929, this Brazilian scientific journal is being published uninterruptedly for the last 80 years, fostering the development of science worldwide. The AABC is a multidisciplinary periodical that aims to make public original research based on quality and excellence only.As can be observed, science is continuously being transformed into a multinational enterprise in which collaborations among different nations are growing at a dramatic rate. Although still largely dominated by developed countries, Brazil, China, India and other developing countries tend to find a more substantial space to be occupied in this new mode of operation, playing a more intense role in the advance of the science frontier. This has to be accompanied by an improvement of the national scientific journals, which in their turn have a propensity to be contemplated in a more global context. Several Brazilian journals have perceived this advance and are trying to make a move to follow this international trend. Among the leading ones, the AABC has a great potential to head this course, considering its tradition, impact factor (ISI-Thomson 2006, 0.74) and multidisciplinary nature.In the present issue an original initiative was taken that hopefully will be successful in strengthening this course of action. In a recent article published by the AABC (R. Meneghini and A.L. Packer, AABC, 78: 855-883, 2006), twelve scientific Brazilian groups were identified, which recently published several articles that generated over 100 citations each in the ISI database. Nine of these groups agreed on submitting an original paper to this AABC issue, which went along the usual peer review track. The idea was to capitalize on the international visibility and credibility of these authors who usually publish in very prestigious journals and to follow up the trends of citations of these articles and the impact factor of this particular issue of the AABC. The authors welcomed this idea that was the starting point of this initiative which counted on the keen back up of Dr. Lucia Mendonça Previato, AABC editor-in-chief at that moment. This is an interesting scientometric exercise, but more than that, if thriving it might stimulate similar efforts of other Brazilian scientific journals leading them to get a larger bite of the almost 20 thousand articles per year that flow to the "main stream" journals.SciELO (standing for Scientific Electronic Library on Line, www.scielo.br), a Brazilian meta-publisher of open access journals, has undertaken strategies aiming to improve the quality of the journals and considered this to be an important component in the whole process of doing good science.

H-index in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences: comments and concerns

“…Furthermore, periodicals should make an effort to attract important papers, always keeping rigorous editorial standards for quality control. One of such attempts has recently been made by the AABC, whose outcome remains to be evaluated (Kellner and Meneghini 2008).…”