a Departamento de Ortopedia, Santa Casa de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brasil
b Serviço de Ortopedia e Traumatologia, Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp), São Paulo, SP,Brasil
c Instituto de Ortopedia, Hospital das Clínicas, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, SP, Brasil
d Escola Paulista de Medicina, Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp), São Paulo, SP, Brasil
Introduction
Scientific publication can be summarized as the act of bringingcertain knowledge based on established scientific method-ology into the public domain. Despite the simplicity of theconcept, the importance of published papers needs to behighlighted, which has become refined with the advent of elec-tronic publishing. The importance of published papers lies inthe fact that from them, new knowledge and operative tech-niques are described.
Brazil occupies a prominent position within world-wide publishing, with the 20th highest number of articlesproduced2and 12th place in the field of medicine.3Not onlythe quantity but also the quality of Brazilian articles can bedemonstrated by the large number of Brazilian periodicalsidentified with more than 100 citations.
However, even with the great growth in production of sci-entific articles, Brazilian periodicals have not kept up withthis evolution and are much below the level of internationalperiodicals.5Journals are evaluated by means of their impactfactor, which is based on the number of citations of publishedarticles, over a 2-year period, divided by the number of articlespublished over this same period.
Thus, one of the factors that limit the growth of periodi-cals in Brazil is the low level of citation of articles publishedin Brazilian journals. Pinto and Andrade7stated that Brazil-ian researchers prefer to cite articles in journals from othercountries, even if these do not have an impact factor and donot have high value.
Within the field of orthopedics, Figueiredo8studiedthe reference lists in the Revista Brasileira de Ortopediaover a 36-year period (1966-2001) and found that out ofthe 8465 citations, only 470 (5.55%) came from Brazilianperiodicals.
With the aim of ascertaining the current situationregarding citations of Brazilian journals within orthopedics,the objective of this study was to assess whether there isany preference of citing journals from other countries, to thedetriment of Brazilian citations, in three Brazilian journals oforthopedics.
Methods
This study was characterized as observational and cross-sectional. The reference lists of three Brazilian journalsin the field of orthopedics (Acta Ortopédica Brasileira, Coluna/Columna and Revista Brasileira de Ortopedia) wereanalyzed.
In these journals, the reference lists of all the articlespublished in 2011 were analyzed. All the articles defined asoriginal were included. Articles classified as editorials, reviewsof the literature or case reports, articles without referencesand those in which more than 75% of the references werenot scientific articles were excluded. Articles that fulfilled theinclusion and exclusion criteria were analyzed based on thereferences used.
The study protocol assessed the total number of referencesused. References relating to books, Internet pages or citationsof citations ("apud") were ignored. The numbers of referencescoming from Brazilian journals and from journals in othercountries were ascertained, along with the ratio between arti-cles in Brazilian journals and articles in journals from othercountries.
The ANOVA test was used to ascertain whether there wereany differences between the journals. The nullity hypothesiswas rejected when p < 0.05.
Results
In these three journals, 3813 references distributed among 187articles were analyzed, with a mean of 20.39 ± 8.39 citationsper article. Of these, 306 (8.02%) related to Brazilian journalsand corresponded to an average of 1.63 ± 2.35 citations perarticle.
In Acta Ortopédica Brasileira, 53 articles presenting 996 ref-erences were studied. Of these, 91 (9.13%) related to Brazilianjournals. In Coluna/Columna, 1241 references in 59 articleswere identified, of which 74 (5.96%) came from Brazilian jour-nals. In Revista Brasileira de Ortopedia, there were 75 articlespresenting 1576 references, among which 141 (8.94%) werecitations of Brazilian journals. There was no statistical differ-ence between the three journals analyzed (p = 0.55).
Analysis on the ratio between citations in Brazilian jour-nals and in journals from other countries showed that 76(40.64%) of the articles studied did not cite any article pub-lished in Brazilian journals and only two articles (1%) usedarticles in Brazilian journals more than those in journals fromother countries.
Discussion
Even with the exponential growth of Brazilian scientific pro-duction, Brazilian periodicals have been able to present the same performance and they still present low impact factors.There are several reasons for this. Goffi10raised the hypothesisthat there are few Brazilian journals indexed in internationaldatabases, which makes it more difficult to search for nativeproduction.
Pinto and Andrade7took into account other factors respon-sible for this low valuation, such as the paucity of journalsubscriptions among institutions or Brazilian authors' pref-erence for journals in other countries, even if these do nothave an impact factor and even if the journals do not havegreat value. Guimarães2stated that the preference for citingforeign articles should only be accepted in studies in whichthe subject is entirely new and there is a scarcity of Braziliancontributions.
In the present study, it was found that in these orthopedicsjournals, each article cited a mean of 11.46 foreign articlesfor each article in a Brazilian journal, which makes it diffi-cult for Brazilian scientific journals to more toward reachingthe impact factor levels of the international journals. If Brazil-ian researchers themselves do not cite Brazilian journals, whyshould foreign researchers do so?
The low citation levels of Brazilian periodicals can also beunderstood through the fact that the postgraduate programsof the Brazilian public universities, particularly those of strictosensu type, which are the ones mainly responsible for Brazilianpublication,11evaluated the Qualis of the periodicals in whichtheir articles are published. This leads to exportation of thebest studies developed, to foreign journals with higher Qualisvalues.
This "flight" of the best national results leads to losses forthe country, given that a large proportion of these articles arefunded by Brazilian national agencies for research stimulation(Capes, CNPq and FAPs). This results in benefits only for for-eign periodicals and leaves the local periodicals only with the"leftovers",3,9,10as well as making it difficult for researchersand physicians to have access to the best research.
The results from this study showed that 8.02% of the cita-tions in the main Brazilian orthopedics journals related toBrazilian periodicals. This is a significant increase in relationto the study by Figueiredo, in which this rate was 5.55%, andrepresents an important gain for Brazilian research and par-ticularly for Brazilian orthopedics journals, which certainlyshould have higher value.
This study did not have the aim of stimulating scientificxenophobia. On the other hand, although it is common sensethat valuable scientific data published outside of Brazil should cited,9the fact that more than 40% of the articles stud-ied did not cite any Brazilian article represents devaluation ofBrazilian production.be
Conclusion
There is a preference for citing references from journals inother countries in the Brazilian periodicals studied here. Thisindicates that there is a need to encourage researchers to citeBrazilian articles and thus improve the quality of the scientificjournals within orthopedics.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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