Apresentação

Abstract

The Revista Brasileira de História (the Brazilian Journal of History) succeeded in obtaining a place on the SciELO Brasil (Scientific Electronic Library on Line) in 1998, one of the first periodicals to do so in the Brazilian version of this website, and with this assumed a pioneering role in the area of the humanities. More recently, other journals in our area have also become part of the website, facilitating the search for articles over a diverse range of researchers, and opening up an increasingly useful path for the construction of historical knowledge. This, however, is not a privilege. It is related to the quality of these periodicals which, to be accepted, had to satisfy innumerable formal requirements for publication that must be maintained in each issue. They are especially noteworthy in adopting ways of offering their readers articles of quality and originality that really do contribute to debate among researchers. For the historian entering onto a website of this type frequently carries with it a sensation of being somewhat ill at ease, as many resources-common to the researchers of other sectors-to us appear somewhat mysterious. However, the utility of the various tools, and the dynamic that they can initiate both in our bibliographical research as in the disseminating of knowledge rapidly becomes evident. After all, an author writes to be read. On the website, each journal produces its search tools by author, subject, title, as well as for the key words required in each article. In the utilization reports, one can find the year of ingress of each periodical on the website, long term yearly statistics relating to the visits to the volumes and the number of articles requested each month. On the specific site of each journal, once again, search opportunities of the articles are presented in various ways, but also instructions to the authors, the periodical's details, and the exact number of consultations for each article. From there, the visitor can read or freely print the texts, or just decide what is of interest through reading the summaries. Nevertheless, the references used in each text can also be visualized and the link for each of them followed through Google. There are also search tools for articles on similar themes, the route to the author's Lattes curriculum (and