International versus national oriented Brazilian scientific journals. A scientometric analysis based on SciELO and JCR-ISI databases

Summary

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library on Line, www.scielo.bireme.br) is aprogram aimed at offering a core of Brazilian Scientific Journals in an open access mode at internet. This initiative has been followed by other Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian countries. Along with the development of the open accessed electronic library, a complementary scientometric/bibliometric database has been set up which permit to retrieve citation data of more than 40,000 articles. The robustness that this database has now achieved allows one to make important studies which were not possible before, using only the international Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database.