EDITORIAL

The Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia (Brazilian Journal of Epidemiology - RBE) has followed the increase in scientific production in the field of Public Health and Epidemiology

Marcia Furquim de Almeida

Scientific Editor

The Brazilian Public Health scientific production and its international visibility have been increasing in recent years. According to data from the Scientific Journal Rankings (SJR) from 2006 to 2010¹, the Brazilian Public Health production came in sixth place in the ranking of world scientific production, accounting for 7,680 documents. Brazilian public health production had a 51 H-index, maintaining the 17^th place worldwide. The field of Epidemiology comprised 459 documents, with a 38 H-index and holding the 18^th place in this period¹.

The dissemination of documents on the SciELO Library has enabled the Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia to advance. The impact factor of RBE articles has increased with time; from 0.389 in 2006 to 0.776 in 2010, according to SciELO². In the last three years, the RBE was indexed in international databases such as SCOPUS (SJR) and PubMed, which increased the international visibility of publications. In SJR, the impact factor was 0.05, with 0.7 citations per document. International collaboration was present in 18.5% of the articles published in 2010³.

This greater visibility caused an increase in the number of submitted manuscripts. The monthly average number of manuscripts was 24.5 in 2008, rising to 37.6 in 2011. The RBE received 783 manuscripts between 2009 and 2011; 64.5% of the manuscripts were not accepted, 17.6% were approved and 17.9% are under evaluation.

It is not a simple task to identify the sub-areas of knowledge of manuscripts submitted to the RBE. Many papers concern more than one specific area, and their classification may involve a certain level of subjectivity. The main sub-areas of these manuscripts were: non-communicable diseases (141), communicable diseases (121), nutrition (104) and oral health (80) and others specific areas.

In 2009, the RBE started to promote an incentive policy for the translation of approved papers into English to disseminate them in the electronic version. This fact increased the proportion of bilingual articles from 33.3%, in 2009, to 50%, in 2011. The objective of this journal is to achieve 100% of bilingual articles by 2012. This goal will certainly increase the external visibility of scientific production. Recent SciELO Library seminar⁴ has shown that the dissemination of research in English is an important tool to increase the impact factor of national scientific production.

This development relies on the invaluable participation of researchers, referees and RBE staff. The Scientific Editor is grateful for this collaboration.

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