Evaluation of Brazilian emerging ejournals in Science and technology : a proposed methodology based on analysis of links to ejournal's site

This paper reports the results of a research project, sponsored by CNPq – the Brazilian Council for the Development of Science an Technology -, which develop an evaluation methodology for the emerging Brazilian ejournals in Science and. In Information Science, citation is a traditional measure of prestige for a scientific journal. Brazilian ejournals are a recent reality in Brazilian Web scenario. One of the main barriers to increase their use by Brazilian academic community is the lack of systematic evaluation, like that provided by ISI’s impact factor. The proposed methodology were based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the links to the site of the ejournal, obtained by submitting its URL to Google search engine. The methodology considers not only the number of links directed to a site, but also the existence of qualitative links, those of “authorities” sites in an specific knowledge area, and those of non-Brazilian institutions. “Authorities”, in Brazilian scientific scenario, are considered sites of institutions like specialized or academic libraries, sites of scientific or professional associations and sites of important post graduation programs in a specific area; non-Brazilian sites were also considered qualitative links, because they indicate the reach of an ejournal. These different kinds of links were weighted and used to calculate a grade to an ejournal site, as an indicator of its relevance in a knowledge area. The methodology was first tested and fine tuned in Information Science area and then applied to Brazilian ejournals of several knowledge areas.. This paper reports the results and discusses future developments such as how the methodology could be automated and made available through a web site, having as input URLs of the ejournal site and URLs of community agreed “authorities” sites in a given area. This proposal, in the scope of Brazilian public policies concerning scientific and technological information, could constitute in an cooperative evaluation web resource to the Brazilian scientific community, in addition to other resources like the SciELO gateway (http://www.scielo.br) and the CAPES scientific journals gateway (http://www.periodicos.capes.gov.br).