Ambiente & Água in the context of impact indicators of scientific Brazilian journals

Abstract

For quite some time the international scientific community has criticized the use of impact indicators based only on few journals registered at commercially subscribed databases such as the ISI Web of Knowledge (producer of Journal Citation Reports - JCR). Several studies focusing on different subject areas have demonstrated the advantages and disadvantages of assessing the impact of an article, or journal, from commercial and open-access databases, such as Google Scholar (Segen, 1997; Gisvold, 1999; DuBois and Reeb, 2000; Whitehouse, 2002; Baumgartner and Pieters, 2003; Cameron, 2005; Ha et al., 2006; Mingers and Harzing, 2007). Most of the studies found that there was a strong correlation between impact indicators measured by a commercial databases (restricted) and open-access in certain field areas (Science, Health, Biological and Applied Social), while areas usually with lesser coverage by commercial databases (Environment, Humanities, among others) end up having lower impact indicator values based on these commercial databases. Moreover, the number of publications in these last areas has shown a significant expansion recently and, therefore, they end up receiving greater impact scores when evaluated by open-access databases. In these cases the correlation between impact indicators calculated by restricted versus open-access database is significantly lower. In this exercise, developed to obtain impact values of various Brazilian scientific journals in international open-access databases, not only it could be demonstrated the role that the journal Ambiente & Água withholds in the national scientific community (and even international if considered the information published in previous editorials), but also witnesses the degree of efficiency, transparency, and simplicity of the indicators used. The Editorial Board of the journal Ambiente & Água stands in favor of using indicators that are transparent, simple, and free of charge in the process of assessing the impact of published articles and scientific Brazilian journals.