Classificação dos periódicos no sistema QUALIS da CAPES: mudança dos critérios é urgente

Abstract

Due to its concern about the future of Brazilian scientific journals after new criteria were adopted by the QUALIS system of CAPES (Brazilian Federal Professor João Pereira Leite spoke on behalf of CAPES. In addition to being the coordinator of the area medicine II, he is also the current representative of the health area in the Technical Scientific Council, which is the main department of CAPES. During one of the meetings, professor Leite provided a detailed explanation about the criteria adopted for three-year evaluation and their impact on Brazilian graduate programs. He also explained that, in face of the evident improvement of the quality of graduate programs, it was necessary to increase the cutoff point or the separation point in order to better differentiate these programs and classify them in terms of their quality level. Based on data from the graduate programs -collected using the data collection system of CAPES -it was found that many programs had more than 50% (some of them even had 80%) of their scientific production published in journals classified article A1. According to professor Leite: "Such equivalence would bring benefits for journals with different qualification levels." Professor Leite also informed that the new classification system was designed based on the median of the journals' impact factor provided by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and calculated every year by the ISI Web of Knowledge. A list of journals including each area of CAPES was made to calculate the median. The median for each area was based on this list and on the respective impact factors; then, a new classification system ranging from A1 to C was created. The editors reminded professor Leite that the three-year evaluation process of CAPES would cause a relative disagreement for the reclassification of the journals, since several Brazilian journals will have their impact factor increased or published for the first time during 2010, mainly those that have just been indexed in the ISI. In addition, these journals would have to wait for three years to change their classification in the new QUALIS. Another aspect that was questioned by the editors is related to the choice of the impact factor published by the JCR as the only and universal index to assess the quality of the journals. There is a high standard deviation in the impact factors of different journals. Certainly, that is the reason why CAPES used the median of these indexes to