EDITOR'S LETTER

Dearest,

Here it goes another issue of Horticultura Brasileira. Our cover portrays taro, a vegetable crop whose potential is definitely under utilized.

This issue is the farewell of our editors Alice Maria Quezado Duval, José Orestes M Carvalho, Marie Y Reghin, Ronessa B de Souza, Rosana F Otto, and Rovilson José de Souza. To you all, our deepest and sincere appreciation for the competence and time dedicated to Horticultura Brasileira. At the same time, we greet Mirtes F Lima, who joins us as the assistant-editor. Welcome, Mirtes!

In this Editor´s Letter, I would like to come back to the theme Impact Factor of scientific journals. Straightforward speaking, the Impact Factor is currently accepted as the measure of relevance of a journal to the scientific community. The higher the Impact Factor, the higher the relevance. The number used to express the Impact Factor is the ratio between the number of citations received by a journal and the number of articles it published. Therefore, the Impact Factor rises as the journal is more often cited.

At Scielo database, we are in comfortable position. Our Impact Factor, 0.3114 (2008, three-year basis), ranks us among the top five journals in our scientific field. Nevertheless, from 2010 ahead, we will also have an international Impact Factor which will be published by the Journal Citation Reports, as a result of our indexing at ISI. This is the Impact Factor taken by Qualis to categorize scientific journals.

Presently, efforts to increase the Impact Factor of Horticultura Brasileira are keeping us quite busy. In addition to continue motivating and aiding authors to publish in English (please, refer to Guidelines for submission of papers, caption The Publishing Idiom, in the end of this issue), we started being more selective on accepting papers for reviewing. Priority is strongly given now to manuscripts reporting significant and high-impact results. These measures will change the impact factor only in the mid-term. However, some consequences are instantaneous, in special, an increase in the number of rejected papers.

There is no way out: in future there is no room for good journals, only for outstanding journals. We want to be one of them.

See you in the next issue,

The Editorial Board

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