Publications in the field of Agrarian Sciences in the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências: what next?

Abstract

It is easy to state that agriculture is a driving force for Brazilian economy. Brazil is a major player in the world due to its agriculture being one of the main world producers of sugarcane, soybean, maize, coffee, amongst others. In more recent years the continuous increase in crop production, whilst keeping the total area of cultivated land almost unaltered, is one example of the tremendous advances obtained in agriculture. The participation of the agribusiness in the Brazilian Gross Domestic Product was 22.34% in 2010 (source: Centro de Estudos Avancados em Economia Aplicada (CEPEA, ESALQ/USP) - Confederacao da Agricultura e Pecuaria do Brasil, (CNA) http://www.cepea.esalq.usp.br). The field “Agricultural Sciences” in the Essential Science Indicators SM of the ISI Web of Knowledge SM (Thomson Reuters) was updated on November 1, 2011 for papers published from January 1, 2001 until August 31, 2011 (10 years + 8 months period). Analysis revealed that amongst the 22 fields for Brazil, Agricultural Sciences ranked 5 th , 11 th and 20 th for the number of papers published (13,231), total citations (40,894) and citations/paper (3.09), respectively. When the Brazilian Agricultural Sciences field performance was compared to other countries, using the same tool “Country/Territory Rankings in Agricultural Sciences”, the field ranked 3 rd , 13 th and 92 nd for the number of papers published, total citations and citations/paper, respectively. In 2010 and 2011 (up to the December 4 th 2011), the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciencias (AABC) received for evaluation 202 and 298 manuscripts respectively, an increase of 47.5% in 2011 over 2010. The submission of manuscripts related to Agrarian Sciences increased from 27 in 2010 to 49 in 2011, an 81.5% increase. AABC published 97 papers in 2010 and 112 papers in 2011, of which 10 and 12 papers respectively, were in the field of Agrarian Sciences, approximately 10-11% of the total in each year. These results mean that the rate of rejection of papers in Agrarian Sciences was considerably increased. It is important however to comment that AABC is a multidisciplinary journal and independent of the number of submissions, the key factor that should never be ignored, is the importance of publishing high quality papers. A quick evaluation of the 22 papers published in AABC over the last two years reveals a wide range of topics in the subject of Agrarian Sciences. For instance, the work of Martins et al. (2010) questioned whether the parasitic fauna of the Nile fish Oreochromis niloticus (Linnaeus, 1758) could be affected by different production systems. The efficiency of boron application in an Oxisol cultivated with banana in