EDITORIAL

The year of 2008 will be a special one for Brazilian epidemiology. For the first time, Brazil will host the World Congress of Epidemiology of the International Epi¬demiological Association (IEA), which will take place concurrently with VII Brazilian Congress of Epidemiology of ABRASCO (Brazilian Association of Post-Graduate Studies in Public Health), expressing the consolidation of Epidemiology in our country.

Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia (RBE) is celebrating its 11th anniversary and we have been indexed in the SciELO Public Health database for four years, which provides electronic access to the articles RBE publishes and has enhanced the visibility of its scientific production. For two years, RBE has also been part of the Scopus database, a fact that also provides greater editorial visibility. As of 2008, we will also offer our authors the possibility of publishing an electronic English version, a fact that will improve even further the visibility of our scientific production.

In this manner, we think it is important to provide our readers with a brief outline of the articles published by RBE. In 2007, 95% of all articles published were by free demand of the community, and reported research results. Three review papers and one letter to the editor were published. Our immediate refusal rate of manuscripts is around 20%; our refusal rate after peer revision is approximately 40%.

The impact factor, in the SciELO database, of the articles published in RBE has been growing continuously. In 2005, it was 0.1346, it went up to 0.1947 in 2006, and reached the rate of 0.3306 in 2007; that is, it has had a three-fold growth. Of total citations of papers published in RBE in 2007, we found that 38.8% were quoted by other articles published in RBE itself; whereas 27.9% were in Revista de Saúde Pública; 22.2% in Cadernos de Saúde Pública; and 11.1% in Ciência e Saúde Coletiva.

These results show that RBE has already consolidated itself as a vehicle for the dissemination of the production in the area. The impact factor of RBE's articles still is smaller than that of its peer journals in the area of public health. On the whole, these results show, on one hand, that we still need to make an effort to improve the impact of our articles; however, on the other hand, we should consider that these journals have been indexed longer and in different indexation databases, which provides greater visibility to their articles.

Reaffirming our commitment to improve RBE's editorial process, we will introduce electronic submission of papers, through SciELO's portal (http://www.scielo.br/rbepid), next September. This fact will contribute to decrease the time for manuscripts analysis.

The information above shows that RBE has been establishing itself in the editorial field and is seeking to become one of the valuable mechanisms for the dissemination of knowledge in the area.

Márcia Furquim de Almeida

Moisés Goldbaum

Publication Dates