The scientific journal Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz achieved yet another achievement in early 2011: it is the Brazilian scientific journal with the highest impact factor in the Scimago journal ranking (SJR), with 0,142. The index – which uses the Scopus database, published by Elsevier – takes into account a period of three years and establishes different values ​​for citations according to the scientific influence of the journal in which it was published. The impact factor of a publication is a proportion between the number of times its articles are cited in a year, based on the journals indexed by the database, and the number of works published by the journal in a given period.

In 2010, the journal surpassed the barrier of two points of impact factor according to the index of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge, another database responsible for evaluating the relevance of the contribution of scientific journals around the world. Edited by IOC since 1909, the publication has presented recent innovations that have contributed to the positive results, such as the creation of the online submission system for articles, the full availability of all articles published since the first issue of the journal, in 1909, and the registration association DOI for each article published. Another factor is the policy of free access to the publication's online content.

More information about the publication in http://memorias.ioc.fiocruz.br/