Our hidden scientific production
(Portuguese
PDF version)
Winston
Bonetti Yoshida *
*
Editor-in-chief of the Jornal Vascular Brasileiro.
J
Vasc Br 2005;4(2):113-3
In an
article published in the renowned magazine Scientific American,1
Gibbs called the attention to the "lost science of the Third World",
a creative and good-quality science, which remains hidden or hardly
accessible to the international scientific community, due to a lack
of adequate indexation and to a difficulty in translating articles in
Portuguese or Spanish. In the editorial of the publication Acta Cirúrgica
Brasileira,2 Medeiros also called the
readers' attention to this problem, emphasizing that our national scientific
production is like an iceberg, in which 80% is submerged, due to a lack
of indexation at international databases.
Unfortunately,
that is not the only problem. Data provided by the Coordination and
Improvement of Higher Level Personnel (CAPES) show that more than 50%
of master's theses and doctoral dissertations produced in Brazil are
not published, lying on drawers and remaining inaccessible to the knowledge
of other researchers, both Brazilian and foreigners. This represents
a great waste of resources of the universities and federal government
agencies, which financed researches and researchers through graduate
programs, without the necessary dissemination to the scientific community.
Papers that remain in drawers, besides not taking part in major impact
journals or bringing prestige to good national journals in a development
process, bring the false impression of a lack of projects, creativity,
and initiatives by Brazilians in this area. Moreover, they do not cause
any impact in terms of citation, reducing the punctuation of graduate
courses that hosted the student.
Similarly,
we have in the Brazilian Society of Angiology and Vascular Surgery (SBACV)
an expressive production of abstracts presented in congresses and meetings,
but they are not proportionally converted into original articles or
case reports for our journal, despite the efforts made by the board
and editorial board in order to encourage authors to send their manuscripts
for publication. The editorial work of the Jornal Vascular Brasileiro
and the quality of the journal would be, respectively, much more efficient
and better if the amount of articles received doubled in relation to
the current situation.
Thus, we
need the collaboration of all colleagues to make our journal grow and
reveal the submerged part of the iceberg. In what concerns us, we have
been giving preliminary approval of awarded articles in our congresses
and meetings, being left only the formal review of the article by our
reviewers, as can be seen at the site of the next National Congress.
Moreover,
the board of the SBACV included in the criteria of Revalidation of Specialist
Title, an expressive punctuation for authors who publish articles in
our journal.
In conclusion,
all colleagues are invited to give more visibility to our scientific
production and participate in the development of our journal by sending
us their articles.
