Results and goals

The last issue of the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (RBHH) – Journal of Hematology and Hemotherapy – was the result of a sequence of events that began after the emergence of the new Qualis classification established by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal do Ensino Superior (CAPES) of the Brazilian Government that ranks scientific journals.(1) All journals were reclassified using just the Impact Factor (IF) of Thompson Reuters; those that were not indexed to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI/JCR) were discriminated against and demoted as second class publications. This had a great impact on the Brazilian academic scene as individual productivity is now measured by the new classification criteria and the IF started to have a great bearing in determining the quality of post graduate programs in the country which are based on the publications of university professors. The implementation of this measure caused reactions with several meetings being organized supported by the Brazilian Medical Association (AMA) and the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (ABEC). These meetings debated the decisions of CAPES and resulted in several joint publications that were printed in many national scientific journals.(2,3) Additionally, with the aim of stressing the true value of Brazilian journals, the use of other parameters to classify journals were discussed in the debates. One suggestion was to adopt the indices of SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and SciELO.(4) The reason why CAPES should adopt these other two indices is related to the fact that the use of the IF alone is not recommendable and because, as was shown by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Clinics, the IF and these two other indices overlap; if this combination were used by CAPES, some journals, including the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia, would be reclassified from B4 to B2.(4) Figure 1 and Table 1 show the correlation between the ISI/JCR and SCImago impact factors and a list of 138 journals excluded by the Qualis criteria including the RBHH.