Analysis of the international impact of the Brazilian base “Qualis”-Education

Abstract

This work deals with the journals in the area of Education classified in the last available Brazilian Qualis database, period 2013 to 2016, seeking to analyze the alignment of the strata to international bibliometric criteria. The impact of a journal implies its internationalization, which is a standard adopted worldwide. This subject has been gaining prominence in higher education and research institutions, which began to consider the production of their researchers in indexed journals. Considering the national and international relevance and the fact that they aggregate publications from various fields, we used data from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases. The results show that belonging to the most relevant international bases is not among the Capes requirements for the classification of journals, and also that there is a relatively low number of journals with a real impact for scientific dissemination in the field of Education. The conclusions indicate that, in the current scenario, researchers in this field will continue to publish their work in journals with little or no impact, making the output of Brazilian research remain without prominence at an international level. To ensure that the Qualis stratification in the field of Education does not distance itself from the international context, it is necessary to adopt criteria that privilege factors such as adherence to WoS and Scopus, especially for the A1 and A2 journals, considered of highest quality.

Reducing the Matthew Effect on Journal Citations through an Inclusive Indexing Logic: The Brazilian Spell (Scientific Periodicals Electronic Library) Experience

“…However, the scientific environment in the country is featured by low interaction between universities and companies, great financial and structural dependence on the federal government [38], and internationalization barriers due to low proficiency in the English language [39]. This profile also leads to many journals and articles written in the local language in certain science fields such as applied human social sciences [40,41].…”

“…For example, level A1 corresponds to high-impact journals; since high impacts of JCR and/or H-Scopus are overall established to define the journals to be part of this level [44]. This procedure shows certain alignment between Qualis and international assessments [41]. As previously mentioned, depending on the field, not all criteria are dimensioned based on international impact measurements (e.g., JCR and SCOPUS) Overall, they can only include indexing in specific databases and directories (e.g., Scielo, Redalyc, Latindex, DOAJ) or other mostly subjective criteria.…”

“…Part of this endogeny can also be explained by the valorization of Brazilian journals indexed in alternative national or Ibero-American open access databases [41], such as Scielo, Redalyc, and Spell itself, which will be analyzed in the present article. The Brazilian experience with national and Ibero-American databases-not only in the Business Administration, Accounting, and Tourism fields-has shown that databases such as Scielo and Redalyc have contributed to improving the quality level of national journals, as well as their visibility and outspread at national and international level [24,26].…”