Cardiology Journals from Portuguese-Speaking Countries: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Scientific development is currently happening at an increasingly faster pace. With this situation, the scientific journals are required to commit to disseminating new knowledge with greater agility and broad propagation by the main international indexers. On the other hand, the mission of the scientific journals is also to encourage the propagation and discussion of new subjects in scientific communities, a situation of great importance mainly for those journals associated with medical societies and with a predominantly national circulation.With respect to scientific propagation at an international level, the use of the English language has been well defined as being universal, leaving those publications in other languages to the background. Only articles published in English in broadly indexed journals achieve a greater number of citations, collaborating effectively in consolidating the involved research groups and elevating the impact of the periodicals in which they were published. 1 On the other hand, health professionals in several countries still encounter difficulties in accessing the international scientific literature and find in their local language the primary means to keep up with new knowledge.According to the indexer SCImago, from the company Elsevier, Portuguese-speaking countries were responsible for more than 20 thousand scientific publications indexed in the health-related area in 2015. 2 Of these, 1130 were published in the areas of cardiology or cardiovascular sciences, representing 2.1% of all the publications in these areas of knowledge. 2 Most of these studies originated from Brazil or Portugal, countries that have consistently ranked among the 30 most important in the production of knowledge in health sciences over the past two decades. Among the publications from Portuguese-speaking countries, there is a predominance of publications in journals with international circulation, written in English, which have a greater potential for knowledge dissemination. However, about 42% of the studies from Brazilian or Portuguese researchers have been only published in Portuguese or in both languages, English and Portuguese, emphasizing the relevance of these publications for countries of Lusitanian culture. According to the SciELO portal, the number of views of articles published in Portuguese in the Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia, a journal with articles indexed in the portal in both Portuguese and English, totaled more than 4.6 million downloads in 2016, while the number of downloads of publications in English of these same studies were slightly more than 2.9 million. 3

The Challenge of Eight Years as Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia Editor-in-Chief

“…However, the scientific publications from countries with specific cultural characteristics, such as Portuguese-speaking countries, should be guided by policies that consider not only the need for wide content dissemination at international level but also the appropriate dissemination among their professional community members. 8 We identified that our leaders and associates wanted to maintain the name of our major journal in Portuguese, going along with the preservation of its 70 years of history and the perspective to continue to have its content disseminated to all Brazilian cardiologists.…”