Estudos Avançados Journal is SciELO’s top ranking publication

Estudos Avançados: 2.5% of the hits among the visited publications (graphic published by SciELO on November 9, 2015)

Estudos Avançados is now the most accessed publication among the 280 journals that comprise the current collection of SciELO’s Brazilian database since its inception. SciELO is a digital library of selected publications of scientific journals.

The new top 10 most accessed journals were made known on November 9. In SciELO’s annual statistics, Estudos Avançados already held the top position since 2013. The IEA publication was included in SciELO’s digital library during professor João Evangelista Steiner’s tenure (2004-2007) as director of the Institute.

Since it was indexed in 2004, Estudos Avançados has received 29,529,460 hits, the highest total number of accesses in SciELO’s collection to date. The number represents 2.5% of the hits of the accessed publications.

The second position belongs to Cadernos de Saúde Pública, of the Fiocruz Foundation, followed by Química Nova, of the Brazilian Society of Chemistry. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, of USP’s School of Nursing in Ribeirão Preto, appears in fourth place, followed by Revista de Saúde Pública, of USP’s School of Public Health.

In March 2004, SciELO indexed issue 49 of Estudos Avançados. The complete collection has been available online since April 2006 and can be accessed through the SciELO or the IEA website. In 2006, Estudos Avançados was also included in the Scopus database, one of the most important international bibliographic databases; the journal is available online from issue 56 onward.

The inclusion of Estudos Avançados in SciELO’s and Scopus’ collections, not to mention its electronic version in English, has greatly added to the publication’s international appeal. According to executive editor Dario Luis Borelli, “These initiatives have provided the journal with greater visibility and a high and growing number of hits.”

The complete collection of the journal can also be accessed through CAPES’ Portal de Periódicos and USP’s Portal de Revistas, maintained the Integrated Library System (Sibi). Alternatively, Estudos Avançados can be accessed through the Lilacs (Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences) or the IBICT (Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology) portal.

Editorial consistency

In 1987, Estudos Avançados embarked on its fundamental mission, closely paralleling that of the IEA: “To produce and convey knowledge that reveals and provides better understanding of what we broadly call ‘Brazilian reality’: its achievements, its impasses, its contradictions,” as defined by Alfredo Bosi, the journal’s editor since 1989.

Estudos Avançados fundamental aim is to promote transdisciplinary scholarship, building bridges between the Natural Sciences and the Humanities – a premise that led directly to the wide-ranging variety of subjects broached over the publication’s 28 years.

The editorial eclecticism and depth has been evident from the very start. In October 1987, inaugural edition brought Political thought for Raymundo Faoro, as well as a dossier on the French Revolution.

Alfredo Bosi, Professor Emeritus from the USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH), and editor of Estudos Avançados

“I believe that the persistence with which it followed its own path, focusing on pure science and public policy, created a reader profile. These readers often seek a specific subject and find other related links. They obtain reliable information and can deepen their knowledge of the burning issues of the time, which don’t always receive proper treatment from the media,” says professor Bosi.

The scientific touchstone that assures editorial impartiality, and the briskness of the texts, even when dealing with arid matters, also contributed to the journal’s success in Bosi’s view.

“We have a large number of appraisers, who provide us with editorial security. Proper scientific practice results in credibility. On the other hand, as deeply as we examine a certain subject, the texts themselves contain no overly technical expressions or nomenclatures,” says the editor.

According to Bosi, the editorial board makes a concerted effort of “translation,” or linguistic germaneness, so that the texts are accessible but suffer no loss of quality. “Authors are not journalists, but this does not prevent us from striving towards a scholarly dissemination of science,” says Bosi.

Bosi explains that often articles and essays arrive in the format of a report. “Because of my literary training, I sometimes get impatient with the many acronyms. If the author cannot write an elegant text, it should at least be readable. But it is a delicate business to say this to authors, because they don’t want to relinquish the acronyms and jargon of their field. In the end, however, we manage to carry out this linguistic accommodation. We have a good reviser,” he insists.

Looking back at the last 10 issues of Estudos Avançados, Bosi reinforces his argument that persistence in following the journal’s initial trajectory has guaranteed its success among readers. “Most important is the recognition by a vast community of qualified readers that the journal is consistent, publishing with academic rigor scientific matters and subjects that are glossed over by the media. The last 10 issues show that there is a balance between questions of national and international public policy and texts of a more academic nature.”

Bosi recalls issue 75, which dealt with developmentalism. “It was and still is a controversial term because it is widely used in many different ways. We deepened the discussion thanks to [Luiz Carlos] Bresser Pereira, who was one of our reviewers,” Bosi calls to mind.

He also remembers a few memorable issues, some of them among the most accessed in the journal’s history. The dossier of issue 80, for example, brought a retrospective analysis of the 50 years of the military coup in Brazil, with a rich iconography organized from the images of an exhibition held in early 2013 by the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB).

The next Estudos Avançados, issue 85, will bring diagnoses of the serious unemployment situation in Brazil, pointing out solutions to the crisis.