Overcoming Obstacles

Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery In times of economic crisis, with the government cutting funds in various sectors, including science and technology, with serious consequences in scientific research and, consequently, the production of good articles, periodicals must learn to reinvent themselves in order to be most read/accessed by attracting more interesting studies. To make matters worse, the difficult moment that crosses the country makes that Brazil is no longer an attractive market even for science, without obtaining funds from international institutions for the development of research with sufficient potential to develop into good standard original articles. Linking this situation to the modus operandi of the Brazilian and international science, in which the impact factor of a journal ends up being one of the main attractions, but the principal, for an author to submit his study to a particular journal, those who know how to unite quality and creativity are more likely to get along in this “race for good articles”. It is not an easy task for Brazilian publications in general. While the international journal with the highest impact factor (IF), according to data from the Journal Citation Reports, from Thomson-Reuters, 2015, the CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, has an IF of 115.840, followed by New England Journal of Medicine, with “only” 55.873, the Brazilian journal with a higher IF, the Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome, achieved 2,173 index. It means, an abysmal distance. We feel a reflection of this cooling situation on the interest in Brazilian scientific production also in the Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery (BJCVS), whose site that has come to be accessed by more than 100 countries in the recent past, had this number reduced to almost one-third, even with an intense work on the disclosure of the journal and many actions to attract more readers and authors from abroad, using only the English language throughout its structure, including the articles, by recognizing this as the “lingua franca” of scientific communication. The reduction, fortunately, was not reflected in the number of articles submitted from abroad. Just as an example, in this issue we have studies produced in the China, Iran, Turkey, and USA. But this scenario is a warning to intensify the search for more readers and more manuscripts, so we can grow again in FI and Qualis, from Capes. We are taking important steps to ensure that the BJCVS can approach competitively to potential readers and authors, drawing attention to our values, as being our journal the only publication of the specialty in the Southern Hemisphere, completing 30 years of fruitful existence. EDITORIAL