The evaluation of scientific productivity in Brazil: An assessment of the mental health field

Abstract

Brazilian scientific production has increased significantly over the last decade, and mental health has been a leading research field in the country, with a growing number of articles published in high quality international journals. This article analyses the scientific output of mental health research between 2004 and 2006 and estimates individual research performance based on four different strategies. A total of 106 mental health scientists were included in the analysis; together they published 1,209 articles indexed in Medline or ISI, with over 65% of the production in journals with impact factor 1. Median impact factor of publications was 2. Spearman correlation coefficient showed a large positive correlation between all four different measures used to estimate individual research output. Ten investigators were together responsible for almost 30% of the articles published in the period, whereas 65% of the sample contributed with less than 10 articles.

Ten-year growth in the scientific production of Brazilian Psychiatry: the impact of the new evaluation policies

“…Recent data from Gonçalves et al 7 have shown that Brazilian investigators are increasingly publishing their articles in highimpact journals, and that between 2004 and 2006, the mean IF of the scientific production on mental health issues was found to be 2.21 (the median applied is 2, and the range is 0 to 31.44). These data have shown that Qualis ratings have become obsolete, thus encouraging CAPES to formulate a new set of evaluation criteria in order to be able to better discriminate between the quality of different top-ranked articles, since articles published in very high-impact journals such as Science and Nature would be measured as being the same as articles published in any journal with IF larger than 1.…”

“…1 Several articles on the growth of scientific production in Brazil have been published in the last few years. [2][3][4][5][6][7] Leta et al 2 demonstrated that the number of publications about psychiatry increased 168% between 1981 and 1995. Razzouk et al 4 showed that ISI articles authored by Brazilian researchers in the fields of psychiatry/psychology doubled in the 1999-2003 period.…”

Perfil e análise da produção científica dos pesquisadores brasileiros em Neurociência Clínica

“…Several studies have assessed the scientific production of Neurosciences in Brazil and Latin America [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] . However, specific data about the main Brazilian researchers in this area of knowledge are still relatively scarce 16 .…”

“…Of note, three Brazilian psychiatric journals are currently indexed at Journal Citation Report, with an impact factor ranging from 0.574 to 1.593 and publishing innovative research 31,32 . In an evaluation of the Brazilian scientific productivity in the field of Mental Health, Gonçalves et al 16 showed that the average IF of 105 journals increased significantly when comparing two periods 1998-2002 (average 1.9) and 2004-2006 (average 2.8) 7 . Thus, the 90 th percentile for the IF of journals in which the Brazilian researchers in the field of mental health have published during the first period was 4, while the IF for the journals best ranked (top 10%) during the last three years was 5.1, representing an increase of 25% 7 .…”

A RBP é a revista médica de maior Fator de Impacto na América Latina

“…Overall, it is the evidence of the results of the investment in the Brazilian research and the implementation of a policy of development and reinforcement of Graduate Programs, which are the direct and indirect birthplace of a large portion of the national scientific production. 3 It also means that there is a syntonic policy put into practice by consecutive administrative boards of the Brazilian Association of Psychiatry (ABP). Such policy is characterized by investment in the scientific improvement and independence of RBP.…”