Ten-year growth in the scientific production of Brazilian Psychiatry: the impact of the new evaluation policies.

OBJECTIVE Developed by the Ministry of Education, the Qualis evaluation criteria have strongly impacted the scientific production of Post-Graduation Programs. A new set of more stringent criteria has been proposed for Qualis. Our aim was to evaluate the impact of the new Qualis criteria on the scientific production of Post-Graduation Programs in psychiatry over the last 10 years. METHOD We extracted data from annual reports published between 1998 and 2008, and compared performance measured in terms of the old Qualis rating criteria and the new set of criteria. RESULTS There was a 25% increase in the number of Information Science Institute-indexed articles in the second five-year period, which rose from 1,213 to 1,518. While, according to the old Qualis criteria, 84% of the Information Science Institute production would have been classified as highly-rated (IF > 1), only 17% of the papers were classified as highly-rated (A1) according to the new Qualis rating criteria. Most papers (65%) were assigned to intermediate categories (B1 and B2) with an IF < 2.29. DISCUSSION All psychiatric Post-Graduation Programs have increased their production, but by favoring quality over quantity, the new rules have proved to be more useful for discriminating among the scientific production.