Countries emerging as major scientific powers

The last issue emphasized the changes taking place in the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (RBHH) and discussed the reasons that the Associação Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (ABHH) and her two sister societies decided to internationalize the journal.(1-3) It was pointed out that one of the primary reasons for this was the new Qualis classification by the Brazilian further education council (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Capes). In several articles, editors of many Brazilian journals voiced their unanimous disagreement at the use of just the ThomsonReuters impact factor in the preparation of this new classification.(4,5) The impact factor has long been used inappropriately to assess the productivity of individual researchers and professors and consequently in academic decisions related to promotion. Thus, several reports exorcise the Thomson-Reuters impact factor and recommend that other indices, such as those of SCImago and SciELO, should also be used in the classification of scientific journals.(6,7) This is justified and so the objective of the Brazilian editors was to valorize national production and Brazilian journals. In June, Crossref Quarterly, the e-letter of one of the institutions that attribute Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to scientific publications on the internet, reported on the Brazilian evolution over the last two years in respect to the number of requests for DOIs.(8) Crossref cites Brazil because of the recent increase in membership; the RBHH is one of these new members. Another article from the Royal Society entitled “Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global scientific collaboration in the 21st century” identifies the new emerging countries of great scientific power led by China and including Brazil and also throws light on the growing scientific production of countries that are not normally mentioned such as Iran, Turkey and Tunisia.(9) China is now the second highest producer of scholarship articles worldwide and the fourth in medicine.(10) Eleven years ago it was the nineteenth in the ranking of SCImago in medicine, that is, behind Brazil which was the seventeenth (Table 1). China's contribution has accompanied its intense economic progress that has been observed over the last fifteen years.