The uncertainty of colombian scientific journals with Publindex

Abstract

The colombian National Bibliographic Index, Publindex, has defined during the last two decades the management and editorial quality, the dissemination and even the number of scientific journals indexed in Colombia 1. The criteria with which Publindex accepts a scientific journal and qualifies it in this index are the road map of a large number of editorial committees and universities. These criteria have not changed much since their inception and corresponded to a minimum editorial approach (ISSN registration, creation of editorial committees, percentage of institutional endogamy, punctuality in publication, among others) rather than results in indicators of use and diffusion (indexation in specialized databases, citations, international collaboration, etc.). For the year 2010, the number of journals indexed in Publindex increased, and it slowed down the promotion of journals to higher categories 2. Due to the above, Publindex adopted in that year a mixed classification system with four categories (A1, A2, B and C) based on the quartiles of the SJR (Scientific Journal Rankings) indexes of Scopus or JCR (Journal Citation Report) of Web of Science (normalized), and it superimposed the top two quartiles of the classification with the Google Scholar Metrics H-5 index (not normalized) in the two lower categories (B and C). With this system, in the convocation No. 768, Publindex recognized 33 journals in the health area (medicine, nursing and pharmacy); 16 because they are indexed in Scopus (Colombia has only two health journals in Web of Science in quartiles inferior to those classified in Scopus) and 17 with the quartile system H-5 of Google Scholar Metrics (GSM). This measurement was aligned with international systems; but it did not correct the editorial stagnation suffered by scientific journals; and there will emerge others if corrections are not early made.