Special volume on Biodiversity at the AABC

Abstract

Evaluating the performance of journals, which is directly linked to the articles published by them, is not an easy task, but must be on the editors' radar. There are several questions and concerns about perceptions regarding bibliometric indicators (e.g., Hammarfelt & Haddow 2018) and how they affect scientists' choices as to where to publish the results of their research (e.g., Lemke et al. 2021). However, one way or another, every year editors look forward to the publication of the Journal Citations Reports (JCR) that measures the Impact Factor (IF) of the journal under their responsibility.Having this in mind, I have been carrying out some brief surveys on the performance of the papers that the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (AABC) -the sole comprehensive multidisciplinary journal edited in the country -, are publishing. I focused on published issues or specific areas (e.g., Kellner 2020a, b, c) that provided a general overview about the impact of the articles accepted by the AABC (Kellner 2020d). Some results of these analyses lead to the restructuring of the possibilities of submissions to new and more specific scientific fields in this journal (Kellner 2021).Among the expectations on how to improve the overall impact of AABC are the special issues (e.g., Kellner 2020c), which have been published over the years. Among these, issue AABC 91 Suppl. 3 stands out, which brought together a selection of studies that were presented during the Brazil-France Biodiversity Symposium (Val & Moura 2019).There is no doubt that biodiversity affects many aspects of life on our planet (e.g., Ellwanger et al. 2020), from the increasing impact of agriculture (e.g., Bacarji et al. 2020) to disease risks (e.g., Val 2020) that became quite evident in the recent pandemic (e.g., Melo et al. 2020), which, by the way, is not over yet. For these (and other) reasons, there seems little doubt that biodiversity will continue to be a hot topic for years to come. Here I will cover how the special edition AABC 91 Suppl. 3 impacted on both, the AABC IF-2020 (1,753) and the AABC IF-2021 (1,811), the highest ever for this magazine.The issue AABC 91 Suppl. 3 comprises a total of 21 articles (plus editorial and foreword), covering four scientific fields. As somewhat expected, most fall into Biological Sciences (17). There are also two papers in Chemical Sciences and one each in Health Sciences and Biomedical Sciences. The data used here was acquired using the Journal Citations Reports (2022), applying the filters for the years 2020 and 2021.All articles were retrieved in the present Journal Citation Reports (2022), with a Missing Article Index (MAI, Kellner 2020a) of zero. As I have already presented several times (e.g., Kellner 2020a, d)