Health information without frontiers: creating a Catalogue of Biomedical Journals in Portuguese Language

Introduction

Portuguese is the official language in eight countries (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé e Príncipe) with more than 240 million people. Portuguese is also official language in about 20 Intergovernmental organizations. Portuguese is the sixth spoken language in the World by number of native speakers. However, the presence of Portuguese language in scientific communication, and especially in biomedical literature, is lower than expected. Due to the vast number of scientific journals, access to scientific literature is no longer done through manual search of printed journals tables of contents. The enormous amount of information makes it difficult to find the required information, constituting the Information Paradox. The necessity to create an International Catalogue of Scientific literature appeared in the 19th century (1). Due to the lack of information technologies (IT) at that time, this universal catalogue disappeared few years after its creation. More specific secondary sources were created some years later, such as Index Medicus for medical journals. With the advent of computers and then telematics, Pubmed was created, as well as the more generalist Science Citation Index. The inclusion in those secondary sources is a major goal for journal editors, since not being included leads to their complete obscurity. Secondary sources have a strict journal selection process (2). Several biases were found resulting from this selection process, namely geographic and language biases (number of journals published in the U.S. and in English is disproportionally high). However, publishing in native languages and in local journals is a convenient practice for some types of articles. Epidemiological studies from a restricted geographical area or health economy analysis associated to local policies or local clinical practice guidelines, may not have interest for an international audience, but may be highly relevant for a country interests. We found a considerable amount of papers mapping the literature in Portuguese or by researchers from Portuguese-speaking countries in health sciences. The sources for data gathering are major secondary sources that have different journal selection policies that may exclude many national journals (3,4). Identifying all the biomedical journals in a country, not only those indexed in major databases, is not a simple task (5). To accomplish this task, a search will be conducted in national and international databases.

Objectives

We propose to identify all the biomedical journals publishing articles in Portuguese in countries members of the CPLP [Community of Countries of Portuguese Language] to create a catalogue of biomedical journals in Portuguese language (that should be the first step of our project that aims to improve the visibility of biomedical journals in Portuguese language).

Methods

The methodology adopted could be divided in several steps: identify the national and international resources (databases or websites) to know the biomedical journal in Portuguese language, establish the criteria to select journals and the important fields to retrieve data for the future catalogue. Therefore, we choose Scopus, Ulrich Database, Journal Citation Reports, Pubmed, Free Medical Journals, Índice de Revistas Médicas Portuguesas, DOAJ, Redalyc, Lilacs-Express, Latindex, and Portal de Revistas Científicas em Ciências da Saúde. Regarding journals identification, the first criteria was related with subject area – Biomedical Journals. After that we limited our results to Portuguese language, defined that publication country should be Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal or São Tomé e Príncipe (the eight countries with Portuguese as official language) and, finally we selected only the active publications (since this option was available). These tasks were executed for each selected database/site. The results were exported to an excel file, with the following fields: Title, ISSN, Country, Subject, and indexing database, which allow us to characterize and analyze our set of biomedical journals in Portuguese language. The last step is to eliminate duplicates and supplement each title with the missing information.

Results

As preliminary results were identified all the biomedical journals in Portuguese language, from all the databases. The result shows a predominance of Brazilian Journals. We didn’t found any journal from other CPLP countries, except Brazil and Portugal. At this stage, it was possible to identify 173 Brazilian journals indexed in Scopus, 213 indexed in Scielo, 45 in Medline and 46 in ISI databases. Regarding Portuguese journal, we found 11 indexed in Scopus, 6 in Medline and 3 in ISI (namely, JCR).

Discussion

The results obtained, show us that there is a clear predominance of Brazilian journals. Journals from other countries, except Portugal, were not found. The presence of these journals in international secondary sources is still limited. Not all journals have assigned ISSN. Several errors in the analyzed databases were found, hindering the task of identifying the journals and distinguish the duplicates titles. Various journals with the same title were identified. We also found several equal journals’ abbreviated titles, about different journals. This could contribute to non-distinguish journals title. Since databases have different structure, each one with specific and different fields, it’s very difficult to create a complete and with non-errors file. Also, for the same title, it was identified different information in different databases. Through the journals websites we can identify the incongruous information. However, not all scientific journals have a webpage. In the next stage of this study, we’ll analyze all the titles, one by one, to identify and correct the errors now found. As final remark, it seems really important to create a consistent catalogue of biomedical journals and made it available to research community, librarians and publishers.