Science and impact: the challenge faced by Dental Press Journal of Orthodontics

editorial Every year, in June, the major databases publish the impact exerted by scientific periodicals in the scientific context. While Thompson Reuters quantifies it as the journal's impact factor, SCImago database terms it cites per doc. However, both estimate the average number of citations of articles published in a certain periodical. The methods are very similar, with the only difference being the number of periodicals indexed in each database. Recently, in June 2016, data on the citations made in 2015 were published. The number of citations made in 2015 for articles published in 2013 and 2014 was divided by the total number of articles published in 2013 and 2014. Therefore, an impact factor of 2, for a certain periodical, means that, for every article published in 2013 and 2014, there was, on average, two citations of such articles in 2015. Despite criticism received by such bibliometrics, those evaluation systems have been widely used to assess the importance of a given periodical within its field of expertise. Overall, the more often a recently published article is cited, the greater its impact in the scientific context. Although it has expanded, Dentistry is not among the most impacting fields. While our best-ranked dental periodicals are near the average of having five citations per article, in Medical Sciences and Physics, a few periodicals have exceeded the number of 40 citations per article published. In Dentistry itself, specialties are heterogeneous. On one hand, our Periodontal periodicals have an average cites per doc of 5; on the other hand, in Orthodontics, Ameri-can Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics; Or-thodontics and Craniofacial Research and Angle Orthodontists presented cites per doc varying between 1.66 and 1.62, according to data provided in 2015. Dental Press Journal of Orthodontics (DPJO), indexed in SCImago Scopus database, received its first cites per doc in 2009, when the journal was published in Portuguese only. As from 2010, DPJO articles began to be published in English. Since then, our impact index kept increasing and reached 0.25 in 2012 (Fig 1). At that point, there was an avalanche of good publications , and, in 2013, a setback was rendered necessary , as a consequence of having to double the number of articles published, so as to speed the publication process up. 1 Such change increased significantly this equation denominator. After all necessary adjustments were made, in 2014, DPJO recovered part of its cites per doc …