Development of Biological Sciences at the AABC

Abstract

The submission rate of manuscripts to the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (AABC) has increased continuously over the last decade, albeit more in some areas than in others (Kellner 2017). The Impact Factor (IF) of the journal has fluctuated, reaching the highest value ever (1.280) in the 2019 Journal Citation Reports (JCR). In order to get a general sense on how papers of different scientific fields published by the AABC-the only broad multidisciplinary periodical edited in Brazil-are contributing to the bibliometric indexes of the journal, I have decided to perform some brief analyses looking mainly at citations. In a pilot project, I started with Agrarian Sciences, the area showing the fastest submission growth rate, using one volume published in 2018 as a proxy (Kellner 2020). Here I am expanding my survey, addressing primarily all articles published by the AABC during 2018 in the field of Biological Sciences. In order to allow more uniform comparisons between scientific fields, I have complemented the present analysis with the citations of all papers in Agrarian Sciences published by the AABC during 2018. In my previous survey (Kellner 2020), I was surprised to find out that 15 articles of the issue AABC-90.4, dedicated to Agrarian Sciences were missing from JCR and WoS, and therefore not considered in the AABC 2019-IF. This led me to introduce the Missing Article Index (MAI). Originally defined as the number of articles published in one issue (or year) not found in WoS, divided by the total number of articles published in that issue (or year), MAI is one way to get a sense on how the lack of registration of published papers might influence the IF of a particular journal in a determinate timeframe (Kellner 2020). On some occasions, however, articles might reaper on WoS. As a consequence, the deleterious effects for authors whose articles were missing regarding their metrics of productivity and impact are mitigated. It remains to be established if these metrics (e.g., citations) start to be calculated only from the time when the paper is incorporated in WoS or if the numbers are corrected retroactively. Unlike WoS, once missing, papers tend not to be incorporated in the JCR platform at a later time, permanently affecting the performance of the journal where these articles were published (e.g., Kellner & Azevedo 2013). In fact, all other journals are also negatively affected by this omission, since the articles they have published and that were cited by papers not included in the JCR are not counted in their bibliometric indexes as well. Everyone looses. Perhaps one reason for not promoting the inclusion of missed articles in the JCR at a latter stage is the problematic involved in recalculating the IF of that particular journal. But even more complicated is the fact that the IF of all other journals whose papers were cited by the "new" included

Brief comments on the 2020 Impact Factor of the AABC released by Journal Citation Reports

“…Missing articles are only discovered post factum and regardless of what is done, corrections to citations and IF are infrequent (e.g., Kellner & Azevedo 2013, Kellner 2020c). The database presented by WoS, while also susceptible to miss articles (Kellner 2020b), has at least been corrected and papers (apparently also citations) can be (re)included. It should be noted, however, that it is still unclear how and if the citations added retroactively are indeed correct.…”