For the first time in its history, the centennial magazine Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz surpassed the barrier of two points of impact factor, according to an evaluation by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge - international body responsible for assessing the relevance of the contribution of scientific journals around the world. With an impact factor of 2,097, Memórias surpasses prestigious international publications and ranks among the most important journals in the world in areas such as parasitology, microbiology, epidemiology, medical entomology, tropical medicine and biomedicine. Created in 1909 by public health professional Oswaldo Cruz, the journal's policy is to provide free access to the Internet version and has undergone an intense modernization effort, which includes the online article submission and full digitization of its secular collection.
Editor of Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Ricardo Lourenço de Oliveira celebrates the result and believes that the magazine reached an important goal, which puts it on the same level as some of the most relevant international publications. “Memories is a multidisciplinary journal that covers a very wide range of topics, from vector taxonomy to the molecular study of new ways of diagnosing diseases, especially infectious and parasitic ones. Achieving two points of impact factor was a great objective, since most of the best international journals with this profile have an impact factor just above two points”, he evaluates. “In this way, the publication is placed on the same level as journals such as Acta Tropica, Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, which for years have had an impact factor close to two.”
The editor also points out that the result puts the journal ahead of traditional journals such as Experimental Parasitology, Parasitology Research, Parasitology, Journal of Parasitology, Journal of Tropical Pediatrics and the Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology.
For Ricardo, the success experienced by Memórias in the last decade, when its impact factor rose from around 0.5 to the current 2,097, is the result of constant work aimed at internationalizing the journal and raising the quality of the articles published in it. “We increasingly demand originality and scientific relevance from our work. These strict evaluation criteria mean that only about 50% of the submitted articles are sent to our reviewers, since the pre-analysis by associate editors and specialists screens the impactful contributions and at the same time greatly increases the citations of the material that we publish”, he says.
In addition, the large number of published international articles and, mainly, the presence of many foreign researchers of great importance among the reviewers of the journal are also fundamental factors for the good result, in the opinion of the editor. “Today, 70% of the works evaluated in the Memórias receive the opinion of at least one foreign researcher of relevant productivity in the subject of the manuscript under judgment. This represents an even greater recognition of the applicability of the knowledge contained in the articles and its relevance in a more general context”, he evaluates.
In the evolution of the journal's impact factor, the editor highlights two topics that have made a significant contribution, with a large number of citations worldwide: Chagas disease and leishmaniasis. “These are really two major subjects of the magazine, we publish many articles on these parasites, their vectors, epidemiology, transmission, immune response and other related topics. This places us as one of the most important publications for the study of these parasites. However, it should be noted that we have published many articles of great relevance in several other subjects, which reinforces the multidisciplinary and comprehensive nature of the publication”, evaluates Ricardo.
The good results in no way alter the strategy that aims to further improve the performance of the Memories in the coming years. “We are going to continue investing in the internationalization and quality of the articles, in addition to giving the publication more visibility, to bring more high-level and highly productive researchers to the journal, as authors and as members of our body of evaluators”, reveals Ricardo. “The very increase in the impact factor increases the number of articles submitted and we will be able to choose the most original and really relevant ones, always in the sense of improving the quality of the material published by Memórias”, he concludes.
The magazine Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz was created in 1909 by the sanitarian Oswaldo Cruz, as one of the first specialized Latin American publications, with a high standard of printing and regularity. Many of the most important studies developed on the benches of the IOC and other laboratories in Brazil and Latin America. After stopping circulation for a short period during the military dictatorship, the magazine was resumed and a process of modernization and internationalization was implemented.
The magazine started to publish articles mainly in English, an online submission process for articles was adopted. and the journal now has the DOI, an international article identification system. The publication's collection was fully scanned and made available on its website also for search on the Scielo platform🇧🇷 As a result of these efforts, Memórias became the magazine with the highest impact factor in Latin America in the biomedical area in 2006 and 2008, taking second place in 2007. With an impact factor of 2,097 in 2009, the magazine also ranked second in Brazil, second only to the Revista Brasileira de Farmacognosia. In Latin America, it ranks third among science journals in any area.
* Reporting: Marcelo Garcia
For the first time in its history, the centennial magazine Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz surpassed the barrier of two points of impact factor, according to an evaluation by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge - international body responsible for assessing the relevance of the contribution of scientific journals around the world. With an impact factor of 2,097, Memórias surpasses prestigious international publications and ranks among the most important journals in the world in areas such as parasitology, microbiology, epidemiology, medical entomology, tropical medicine and biomedicine. Created in 1909 by public health professional Oswaldo Cruz, the journal's policy is to provide free access to the Internet version and has undergone an intense modernization effort, which includes the online article submission and full digitization of its secular collection.
Editor of Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Ricardo Lourenço de Oliveira celebrates the result and believes that the magazine reached an important goal, which puts it on the same level as some of the most relevant international publications. “Memories is a multidisciplinary journal that covers a very wide range of topics, from vector taxonomy to the molecular study of new ways of diagnosing diseases, especially infectious and parasitic ones. Achieving two points of impact factor was a great objective, since most of the best international journals with this profile have an impact factor just above two points”, he evaluates. “In this way, the publication is placed on the same level as journals such as Acta Tropica, Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, which for years have had an impact factor close to two.”
The editor also points out that the result puts the journal ahead of traditional journals such as Experimental Parasitology, Parasitology Research, Parasitology, Journal of Parasitology, Journal of Tropical Pediatrics and the Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology.
For Ricardo, the success experienced by Memórias in the last decade, when its impact factor rose from around 0.5 to the current 2,097, is the result of constant work aimed at internationalizing the journal and raising the quality of the articles published in it. “We increasingly demand originality and scientific relevance from our work. These strict evaluation criteria mean that only about 50% of the submitted articles are sent to our reviewers, since the pre-analysis by associate editors and specialists screens the impactful contributions and at the same time greatly increases the citations of the material that we publish”, he says.
In addition, the large number of published international articles and, mainly, the presence of many foreign researchers of great importance among the reviewers of the journal are also fundamental factors for the good result, in the opinion of the editor. “Today, 70% of the works evaluated in the Memórias receive the opinion of at least one foreign researcher of relevant productivity in the subject of the manuscript under judgment. This represents an even greater recognition of the applicability of the knowledge contained in the articles and its relevance in a more general context”, he evaluates.
In the evolution of the journal's impact factor, the editor highlights two topics that have made a significant contribution, with a large number of citations worldwide: Chagas disease and leishmaniasis. “These are really two major subjects of the magazine, we publish many articles on these parasites, their vectors, epidemiology, transmission, immune response and other related topics. This places us as one of the most important publications for the study of these parasites. However, it should be noted that we have published many articles of great relevance in several other subjects, which reinforces the multidisciplinary and comprehensive nature of the publication”, evaluates Ricardo.
The good results in no way alter the strategy that aims to further improve the performance of the Memories in the coming years. “We are going to continue investing in the internationalization and quality of the articles, in addition to giving the publication more visibility, to bring more high-level and highly productive researchers to the journal, as authors and as members of our body of evaluators”, reveals Ricardo. “The very increase in the impact factor increases the number of articles submitted and we will be able to choose the most original and really relevant ones, always in the sense of improving the quality of the material published by Memórias”, he concludes.
The magazine Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz was created in 1909 by the sanitarian Oswaldo Cruz, as one of the first specialized Latin American publications, with a high standard of printing and regularity. Many of the most important studies developed on the benches of the IOC and other laboratories in Brazil and Latin America. After stopping circulation for a short period during the military dictatorship, the magazine was resumed and a process of modernization and internationalization was implemented.
The magazine started to publish articles mainly in English, an online submission process for articles was adopted. and the journal now has the DOI, an international article identification system. The publication's collection was fully scanned and made available on its website also for search on the Scielo platform🇧🇷 As a result of these efforts, Memórias became the magazine with the highest impact factor in Latin America in the biomedical area in 2006 and 2008, taking second place in 2007. With an impact factor of 2,097 in 2009, the magazine also ranked second in Brazil, second only to the Revista Brasileira de Farmacognosia. In Latin America, it ranks third among science journals in any area.
* Reporting: Marcelo Garcia
The non-profit reproduction of the text is allowed as long as the source is cited (Comunicação / Instituto Oswaldo Cruz)
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