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 initial results of a branch of a research project, sponsored by CNPq – the Brazilian Council for the Development of Science an Technology -, grand number 550693/2002-5, for the period of 2003/2006. It aims to develop a comprehensive frame of the situation of the Brazilian electronic journals in Science and Technology;. this specific research intends to develop an evaluation methodology for the emerging Brazilian ejournals in Science and Technology. In Information Science, citation is a traditional measure of prestige for a scientific journal. Brazilian emerging 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 an 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 importance in a knowledge area. The methodology was tested with ejournals of several areas; they were analyzed to compare the factors to be used for calculating their grades. The paper reports the results and discuss future developments such as how the methodology could be automatized, having as input URLs of the ejournal site and URLs of the sites considered as “authorities” in an area and how it could be made available through a web site, constituting an cooperative evaluation web resource to the Brazilian scientific community, in addition to other resources like the SciELO portal (http://www.scielo.br) and the CAPES scientific journals portal (http://www.capes.gov.br)