Analysis of the international impact of the Brazilian base “Qualis”-Education

Abstract

This work deals with the journals in the area of Education classified in the last available Brazilian Qualis database, period 2013–2016, seeking to analyze the alignment of the strata to international bibliometric criteria. The impact of a journal implies its internationalization, which is a standard adopted worldwide. This subject has been gaining prominence in higher education and research institutions, which began to consider the production of their researchers in indexed journals. Considering the national and international relevance and the fact that they aggregate publications from various fields, we used data from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases. The results show that belonging to the most relevant international bases is not among the Capes requirements for the classification of journals, and also that there is a relatively low number of journals with a real impact for scientific dissemination in the field of Education. The conclusions indicate that, in the current scenario, researchers in this field will continue to publish their work in journals with little or no impact, making the output of Brazilian research remain without prominence at an international level. To ensure that the Qualis stratification in the field of Education does not distance itself from the international context, it is necessary to adopt criteria that privilege factors such as adherence to WoS and Scopus, especially for the A1 and A2 journals, considered of highest quality.