Clinics has an Impact Factor

Our first Impact Factor comes five years after the first CLINICS issue circulated and we are extremely happy to inform our readers that Clinics achieved IF = 1.591, which is the third highest ever for any Brazilian Journal. This IF was achieved with 21% of autocites, perfectly within the ethical limits set by ISI-Thomson. One other piece of good news is the fact that slightly more than 80% of the articles we published in 2007-2008 were cited in 2009. This is the first near-first-world result we can be proud about. It allows us to look forward to substantial improvements in the years to come. Apart from our local success, the new JCR-ISI Impact Factors contain a very substantial set of positive novelties regarding Brazilian Scientific publications in general. The total number of included journals in the Science and Social Sciences Citation Indexes rose 132%. As shown in Table 1, this by far the largest relative increase for any of the BRICK countries (I am sure that it is totally acceptable to rank South Korea together with the 4 other fast emerging nations as far as science is concerned).