Reviews and guidelines: Evidence of progress and a starting point for standardization and changes

Brazil is on a course of high development and progress, a fact shown by the media, and proven in economic means and world rankings. In scientific terms, this can be seen in previous editorials of the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (RBHH) and by checking the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR-www.scimagojr.com). We note that the scientific production of Brazil is increasing rapidly with the forecast that it will be one of the top ten science-producing nations in the not too distant future (1,2). Different to other countries with large and high-quality scientific production, the history of Brazil is relatively young with the first real steps in the science and technology sector being taken at the beginning of the 1950s. At this time, two government institutions with mandates directed towards scientific development, the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) and the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq), were created. Additionally, the research funding institution, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (FINEP), was founded in the late 1960s. Soon after, in the 90s the research support foundation of the State of São Paulo, FAPESP, a model for other Brazilian states was established. The data published in a recent work by Almeida & Guimarães on aspects relating to the increase in scientific production in the country are used in this report (3). When we look back at the scientific production in Brazil in the period between 1981 and 1985, we see that 11,560 documents were published. This placed Brazil in the 24 th position in the world ranking with a percentage of around 0.47% of the global scientific production. When these data are compared with those from the period of 2006 to 2010, the publication of scientific papers increased to 132,301 and Brazil jumped to the 14 th position in the world ranking with a global share of 2.45%. The analysis of these two periods indicates an 11.4-fold growth in the scientific production of Brazil. So the scientific production of Brazil has grown at around 10.7% per year, that is five times above the world average (3). One category of scientific communications that is considered central to readers is review articles. Review articles are one of the most read and cited communications and of great importance to the academic and scientific community. Usually written by experts in the field, in the past they gave more than one opinion on the subject which …