ICML 9

9º World Congress on Health Information and Libraries

Salvador, Bahia - Brazil, September, 20 to 23 - 2005

BVS4

4th Regional Coordination Meeting of the VHL

September, 19 to 20 - 2005

P73 - Clinics, a valuable vehicle for the publication of internationally relevant latin american Biomedical Science

CLINICS is the new name of a 60-year-old journal, published uninterruptedly by Hospital das Clínicas, the teaching and research hospital for the São Paulo University School of Medicine.
Formerly named Revista do Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo, the journal began as a record of the clinical activity of the hospital, but it gradually evolved into a publication of research with local interest.
Over the 5-year period of 1999 through 2004, an effort was made by a new editorial leadership to enhance the quality of the journal to make the journal attractive to locally generated research of a higher level of interest. The effort paid off in that the journal saw an improvement of its impact.
In October 2004, a new editorial leadership took over with the mission of correcting a number of structural frailties in order to attain a respectable level of scientific quality. The most important shortcomings were an in-house editorial board that was exclus ively composed of Hospital das Clínicas senior staff, a high degree of endogeny of published material, a slow and cumbersome manuscript review system, and a name that all but excluded any hope of proper international citation. The new name was officially adopted in February 2005 with volume 60(1). The Editorial Board is now 60% external to the hospital, and while an effort is being made to attract publications from outside the institution, results so far may only be described as partially successful. It must, however, be noted that this would not be an easy change under any circumstances, but it is particularly difficult in view of the fact that one quarter of the Brazilian scientific output in the biomedical area arises from Hospital das Clínicas. We have installed online submission and analysis of manuscripts, and the speed of processing has increased by at least 30%.