Melhorar sempre, o nosso desafio!: our challenge!

Abstract

Editorial ince I took over the post of Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery (BJCVS) in 2002, I have tried to implement changes in order to match the publication to the best ones around the world. Despite the natural difficulties, efforts were crowned with the indexing in PubMed/ Medline in 2007 and ISI-Thomson in 2009. As I wrote in this space previously, the indexations do not represent an end but a beginning, because in order to remain indexed we need to maintain the level of content and graphic. So the news does not stop! Our website (www.rbccv.org.br) has been undergoing constant updates in order to streamline the review process. Recently, the deadline for review of the manuscripts was reduced from 20 to 10 days, and it was established that those returned to authors for correction with no return within 70 days will be automatically excluded from the system. The measures aim to provide greater agility and to streamline the flow. Although advances have occurred, the time delay between submission and publication of the paper is still higher than desirable in most cases. Therefore, I ask once again, that authors and reviewers to adhere strictly to the prescribed period. Everybody will win. We are also making efforts to streamline the release of the online edition in English version, with the use of more translators and reduced deadline. Now, our main objective is to increase the Impact Factor (IF) of BJCVS, regardless of the discord raised with the reclassification of Brazilian journals by CAPES, which is still being contested (see Editorial on Page III). The number of citations of BJCVS has grown these past two years. In SCOPUS, we can observe a considerable increase from 2006 to 2009, reaching 0.038 (Fig. 1). It is still far from ideal, but certainly the numbers should be even more significant with the indexing in ISI. But there are still more citations, the level of the articles should be even better. And one way to accomplish this is to be rigorous in the reviews. The