Erwin KrauskopfI
DOI: 10.21470/1678-9741-2019-0211
Dear editor,
I read with great interest the latest editorial published by the Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery (BJCVS)[1] in which the authors presented their views about the impact factor provided by the Journal Citation Report (JCR). However, I believe that the readers of this journal should be aware that BJCVS is also indexed by another global citation database, Scopus. As JCR generates a list of journals indexed by Web of Science, SCImago generates annually a list of journals indexed by Scopus, which are sorted by their SCImago journal rank (SJR) for each of its subject categories. Hence, according to data from SCImago, BJCVS is categorized as Q3 in three subject categories: “Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine”, “Medicine (miscellaneous)”, and “Surgery”.
As the journal has been indexed by Web of Science since 2016, I extracted data published by BJCVS from Scopus for the same time period to establish other journal’s attributes.
First, I searched for the documents published by other journals that cite articles published by BJCVS. I sorted the citing journals by the total number of BJCVS articles cited and determined to which quartile each of the journals belonged, according to their SJR2017. As Table 1 shows, half of the citing journals belong to the first quartile, fact that corroborates the quality of the research being published by BJCVS.
Source Title | Number of documents | Quartile |
---|---|---|
Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery | 161 | Q3 |
Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia | 35 | Q2 |
International Journal of Cardiology | 22 | Q1 |
Plos One | 21 | Q1 |
Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery | 20 | Q1 |
Annals of Thoracic Surgery | 19 | Q1 |
Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia | 19 | Q3 |
Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery | 14 | Q2 |
Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery | 13 | Q2 |
Journal of Vascular Surgery | 13 | Q1 |
As the editorial mentions, most of the contributions accepted by the journal are written by Brazilian researchers from Brazil, followed at a distance by researchers from Turkey, China, United States of America, and India. However, a closer look at the country of affiliation of those researchers that use the information published by BJCVS reveals that 480 articles were written by Brazilian researchers, 341 were authored by researchers from United States of America, 191 were written by Chinese researchers, 89 were authored by British researchers, and 80 were written by German researchers. This information is relevant to readers as it confirms the international visibility of the work being published by BJCVS.
Currently, many members of the research community are considering the use of new metrics to evaluate journals where to submit their manuscripts, following the guidelines set at the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, also known as DORA[2]. Perhaps it is time to begin using metrics that are more meaningful to the researchers.
REFERENCES
1. Evora PRB, do Carmo ACF, Goncalves CSA, Braile DM. Considerationsabout the bibliometric impact factor. The BJCVS is on the right track. Braz JCardiovasc Surg. 2019. Mar-Apr;34(2):I-III. doi:10.21470/1678-9741-2019-0602. [MedLine]
2. Pulverer B. Impact fact-or fiction. Embo J. 2013. 32(12):1651-1652.Doi: 10.1038/emboj.2013.126.