The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.

There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders-representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers-have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community.

An implementation of the trigram phrase matching method for text similarity problems.

The representation of texts by term vectors with element values calculated by a TFIDF method yields to significant results in text similarity problems, such as finding related documents in bibliographic or full-text databases and identifying MeSH concepts from medical texts by lexical approach and also harmonizing journal citation in ISI/SciELO references and normalizing author's affiliation in MEDLINE. Our work considered "trigrams" as the terms (elements) of a term vector representing a text, according to the Trigram Phrase Matching published by the NLM's Indexing Initiative and its logarithmic Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency method for term weighting. Trigrams are overlapping 3-char strings from a text, extracted by a couple of rules, and a trigram matching method may improve the probability of identifying synonym phrases or similar texts. The matching process was implemented as a simple algorithm, and requires a certain amount of computer resources. An efficiency-focused C-programming was adopted. In addition, some heuristic rules improved the efficiency of the method and made it feasible a regular "find your scientific production in SciELO collection" information service. We describe an implementation of the Trigram Matching method, the software tool we developed and a set of experimental parameters for the above results.

Articles by latin american authors in prestigious journals have fewer citations.

BACKGROUND: The journal Impact factor (IF) is generally accepted to be a good measurement of the relevance/quality of articles that a journal publishes. In spite of an, apparently, homogenous peer-review process for a given journal, we hypothesize that the country affiliation of authors from developing Latin American (LA) countries affects the IF of a journal detrimentally. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Seven prestigious international journals, one multidisciplinary journal and six serving specific branches of science, were examined in terms of their IF in the Web of Science. Two subsets of each journal were then selected to evaluate the influence of author's affiliation on the IF. They comprised contributions (i) with authorship from four Latin American (LA) countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico) and (ii) with authorship from five developed countries (England, France, Germany, Japan and USA). Both subsets were further subdivided into two groups: articles with authorship from one country only and collaborative articles with authorship from other countries. Articles from the five developed countries had IF close to the overall IF of the journals and the influence of collaboration on this value was minor. In the case of LA articles the effect of collaboration (virtually all with developed countries) was significant. The IFs for non-collaborative articles averaged 66% of the overall IF of the journals whereas the articles in collaboration raised the IFs to values close to the overall IF. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: The study shows a significantly lower IF in the group of the subsets of non-collaborative LA articles and thus that country affiliation of authors from non-developed LA countries does affect the IF of a journal detrimentally. There are no data to indicate whether the lower IFs of LA articles were due to their inherent inferior quality/relevance or psycho-social trend towards under-citation of articles from these countries. However, further study is required since there are foreseeable consequences of this trend as it may stimulate strategies by editors to turn down articles that tend to be under-cited.

Articles with authors affiliated to Brazilian institutions published from 1994 to 2003 with 100 or more citations: II - identification of thematic nuclei of excellence in Brazilian science.

Articles with 100 citations or more in the scientific literature and with at least one author with Brazilian affiliation, were identified in the Thomson-ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Web of Science bibliometric database covering a 10-year period, from 1994 to 2003 (see Packer and Meneghini 2006); 248 (0.23%) out of a total of 109,916 articles with Brazilian affiliation were identified. This study was primarily carried out to identify thematic nuclei of excellence in research that had major impact in the international literature. Twelve of these nuclei in the fields of Biomedicine, Medicine, Biology, Physic, Chemistry and Astronomy were considered outstanding and their genesis and development were described. The weight of factors such as international collaboration and network organization are distinct in these areas and the reasons for that are discussed.

Articles with authors affiliated to Brazilian institutions published from 1994 to 2003 with 100 or more citations: I - the weight of international collaboration and the role of the networks.

Articles with 100 citations or more in the scientific literature and with at least one author with Brazilian affiliation, were identified in the Thomson-ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Web of Science bibliometric database, covering a 10-year period, from 1994 to 2003; 248 (0.23%) out of a total of 109,916 articles with Brazilian affiliation were identified. This study was primarily carried out to identify thematic nuclei of excellence in research that had major impact in the international literature (Meneghini and Packer 2006). The regional and institutional affiliation distributions of these articles follow approximately that of the total of Brazilian articles in the ISI database. However, some significant deviations are observed derived from the outstanding performance of a few groups responsible for the publication of the HC-ISI (Highly cited ISI) papers. The international collaboration and the network organization of work played a fundamental role in these results. It is evident that the role played by organizations in research networks as well as the international collaborations exerted strong influence in the impact of these articles, although with distinct amplitude in the different fields.

Learning communicate science developing countries

En países en desarrollo se ha producido ciencia de buena calidad, como lo demuestra el número de trabajos publicados en revistas prestigiosas. Sin embargo, la capacidad de producir buenas revistas en tales países está en rémora por varias razones, particularmente la existencia de un sistema internacional de publicaciones dependiente del creciente valor atribuido a la clasificación del ISI-JCR, un enfoque adoptado por autores en todo el mundo, y por sistemas de financiamiento y evaluación. Los países en desarrollo se integraron a este contexto internacional y los esfuerzos por producir buenas revistas locales se limitan a iniciativas puntuales que casi nunca progresan. Una consecuencia importante de este déficit se refiere a la evaluación por pares, instrumento importante para la producción de buenas revistas y fomentar el progreso de la ciencia, que es una experiencia limitada en países en desarrollo. En ese escenario se discute, a la luz de datos recientes, una experiencia iniciada en Brasil y luego adoptada en doce países iberoamericanos. SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) es un programa fundamentalmente apoyado por fondos públicos, dirigido al lanzamiento en línea de las mejores revistas de varios países, con acceso abierto, basadas en revisión por pares y con análisis bibliométrico/cientométrico a fin de indexarlas y mantenerlas en la base de datos. SciELO hace las funciones de un meta-editorial y aspira operar según el movimiento de acceso abierto, haciendo más disponible al conocimiento científico. Los datos presentados muestran evidencias auspiciosas de que un nuevo panorama está siendo establecido en el contexto de la producción de revistas científicas en Brasil.

Articles with authors affiliated to Brazilian institutions published from 1994 to 2003 with 100 or more citations: I - the weight of international collaboration and the role of the networks

Articles with 100 citations or more in the scientific literature and with at least one author with Brazilian affiliation, were identified in the Thomson-ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Web of Science bibliometric database, covering a 10-year period, from 1994 to 2003; 248 (0.23 percent) out of a total of 109,916 articles with Brazilian affiliation were identified. This study was primarily carried out to identify thematic nuclei of excellence in research that had major impact in the international literature (Meneghini and Packer 2006). The regional and institutional affiliation distributions of these articles follow approximately that of the total of Brazilian articles in the ISI database. However, some significant deviations are observed derived from the outstanding performance of a few groups responsible for the publication of the HC-ISI (Highly cited ISI) papers. The international collaboration and the network organization of work played a fundamental role in these results. It is evident that the role played by organizations in research networks as well as the international collaborations exerted strong influence in the impact of these articles, although with distinct amplitude in the different fields.

Foram identificados os artigos com um mínimo de 100 citações na literatura científica e com ao menos uma filiação brasileira, segundo a base bibliométrica Thomsom ISI, no período de 10 anos entre 1994 e 2003. Dos 109.916 artigos com filiação brasileira neste período, 248 apresentaram 100 ou mais citações, ou seja, 0,23 por cento do total. Este levantamento foi feito primordialmente para identificar núcleos temáticos de excelência em pesquisa que tiveram maior impacto na literatura internacional (veja Meneghini and Packer 2006). As distribuições regional e institucional das afiliações desses artigos mais citados seguem aproximadamente aquela do total de artigos brasileiros na base ISI. No entanto, notam-se alguns desvios significativos derivados de grupos destacados quanto à publicação de trabalhos muito citados. Ficou patente que o papel das organizações em rede de pesquisa e as colaborações internacionais tiveram uma grande influência no impacto desses artigos, mas com distinta amplitude nas diversas áreas.

Articles with authors affiliated to Brazilian institutions published from 1994 to 2003 with 100 or more citations: II - identification of thematic nuclei of excellence in Brazilian science

Articles with 100 citations or more in the scientific literature and with at least one author with Brazilian affiliation, were identified in the Thomson-ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Web of Science bibliometric database covering a 10-year period, from 1994 to 2003 (see Packer and Meneghini 2006); 248 (0.23 percent) out of a total of 109,916 articles with Brazilian affiliation were identified. This study was primarily carried out to identify thematic nuclei of excellence in research that had major impact in the international literature. Twelve of these nuclei in the fields of Biomedicine, Medicine, Biology, Physic, Chemistry and Astronomy were considered outstanding and their genesis and development were described. The weight of factors such as international collaboration and network organization are distinct in these areas and the reasons for that are discussed.

Foram identificados os artigos com um mínimo de 100 citações na literatura científica e com ao menos uma filiação brasileira, segundo Thomson-ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Web of Science bibliometric database, no período de 10 anos entre 1994 e 2003 (veja Packer and Meneghini 2006). Este levantamento foi feito primordialmente para identificar núcleos temáticos de excelência em pesquisa que tiveram maior impacto na literatura internacional. Doze núcleos, nas áreas biomédica, médica, biológica, física, química e astronomia foram considerados proeminentes e suas gêneses e desenvolvimento foram descritos. Os pesos de fatores como colaboração internacional e organização de trabalho em rede são distintos em cada uma dessas áreas. São discutidas as razões para isso.