997
Braz J Med Biol Res 39(8) 2006
Citation patterns of Brazilian medical articles
Brazilian medical publications:
citation patterns for Brazilian-edited
and non-Brazilian literature
1Departamento de Cirurgia, 2Departamento de Clínica Médica,
Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais,
Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil
J.R. Cunha-Melo1,
G.C. Santos1 and
M.V. Andrade2
Abstract
Today, the quality of a scientific article depends on the periodical in
which it is published and on the number of times the article is cited in
the literature. In Brazil, the criteria for the evaluation of this scientific
production are improving. However, there is still some resistance,
with authors arguing that Brazilian publications must be preferentially
addressed to the national readers and, therefore, they should ideally be
written in Portuguese. In order to determine the kind of scientific
journals cited in the reference lists of articles published in medical
periodicals edited in Brazil, in the present study we determine the rate
of Portuguese/English citations. Three issues of 43 periodicals (19
indexed in SciELO, 10 in PubMed, 10 in LILACS, and 4 in the ISI-
Thompson base) of different medical specialties were analyzed, and
the number of both Portuguese and English citations in the reference
list of each article was recorded. The results showed that in Brazilian-
edited journals the mean number of citations/article was 20.9 ± 6.9 and
the percentage of citations of international non-Brazilian periodicals
was 86.0 ± 11.2%. Of the latter, 94.4 ± 7.0 are indexed by ISI-
Thompson. Therefore, we conclude that Brazilian medical scientists
cite the international non-Brazilian periodicals more than the national
journals, and most of the cited papers are indexed by ISI-Thompson.
Correspondence
J.R. Cunha-Melo
Rua Groenlândia, 212/1001
30320-060 Belo Horizonte, MG
Brasil
Fax: +55-31-3248-9675
E-mail: jrcmelo@medicina.ufmg.br
Research supported by CNPq (No.
350899/91-6). G.C. Santos is
the recipient of a PIBIC CNPq
fellowship (No. 108996/2004-2).
M.V. Andrade is supported by
NIH Grant R01 TW 00612 (GRIP).
Received January 21, 2005
Accepted January 31, 2006
Key words
• Brazilian medical journals
• Bibliometrics
• Citation patterns
• Brazilian scientific journals
Several renowned biomedical journals
such as Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie (Ger-
many), Journal of Antibiotics (Japan) and
Research in Immunology (France), the former
Annales de l’Institut Pasteur, are now pub-
lished in English (1). One of the largest
bibliographic database, MEDLINE, cover-
ing the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry,
veterinary medicine, the health care system,
and the preclinical sciences, contains biblio-
graphic citations and abstracts from more
than 4,800 biomedical journals published in
the United States and 70 other countries. The
database contains over 12 million citations
dating back to the mid-1960’s. Coverage is
worldwide, but most records are from En-
glish-language sources or have English ab-
stracts (2). Even for the general public inter-
ested in health science, several websites con-
taining important information are in English.
As a result, not only for scientists but also for
others who want to keep up to date with the
news and the developments in the biomedi-
cal field, English is the most influential sci-
Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2006) 39: 997-1002
ISSN 0100-879X Concepts and Comments

998
Braz J Med Biol Res 39(8) 2006
J.R. Cunha-Melo et al.
entific language.
In Brazil, many medical papers are still
published in Portuguese under the assump-
tion that the national medical community
and other audiences would prefer and under-
stand better the information in their native
language, although most of the citations in
periodicals edited in Brazil, even in papers
written in Portuguese, are to English-lan-
guage sources. This behavior has influenced
generations of young scientists, with reper-
cussions on the postgraduate medical MS
and PhD programs in Brazil (3).
Most Brazilian physicians, if asked, could
probably name a number of the most impor-
tant medical journals edited in Brazil. If this
question is posed to different specialists and
academic MDs they would say that the most
read papers are those published in periodi-
cals edited by their National Specialty Asso-
ciations. There is a common belief that Bra-
zilian medical doctors are only able to read
papers published in Brazilian journals,
mainly due to language limitation. How-
ever, this may not be true. Recently, a num-
ber of Brazilian scientific journals have sat-
isfied the requirements for indexation in
SciELO. As a consequence, many of them,
previously published in Portuguese, are now
published in English (4). Therefore, the prob-
lem may not be simply a matter of language,
but also the editorial policy for acceptance
of a paper that would be more rigorous for a
journal indexed in the ISI-Thompson than in
the SciELO base only. Also, a small number
of Brazilian scientific periodicals, although
edited in Brazil, are indexed in international
bases such as ISI-Thompson or PubMed,
achieving an international pattern of quality.
The publication of research in peer-reviewed
journals is only an intermediate outcome,
satisfying to authors, but not necessarily
useful to others. It is not an easy task to
measure how useful a published article is to
clinicians. It is accepted that busy clinicians
must choose carefully what reports of medi-
cal research findings to read, and in survey-
ing the literature should choose publications
of relevance to medical practice with meth-
odological rigor capable of changing prac-
tice. However, we can objectively measure
the impact of a paper on other authors by
how frequently they cite it in their publica-
tions. Articles published in any language but
English mostly share the same fate: com-
pared to English-language papers, they are
less frequently read and less frequently cited.
This implies several consequences. For in-
stance, research results published in a non-
English-language journal often do not reach
the international scientific community, and
thus systematic reviews and meta-analyses
may be biased (5). Citations complete the
chain of publication contributing to the evo-
lution of scientific knowledge (6).
One of the motivations of the present
article was the great influence of non-Brazil-
ian publications observed when the refer-
ence lists of articles from Brazilian-edited
medical journals are analyzed. Our hypo-
thesis is that even if a Brazilian medical
scientist prefers to submit his articles to
journals published in Brazil and written in
Portuguese, he more frequently cites non-
Brazilian journals. The present study evalu-
ated the percentage of non-Brazilian and
Brazilian journals cited in the reference list
of articles published in Brazilian medical
journals. It also compared the citation pat-
tern of these journals indexed by different
databases, i.e., LILACS, SciELO, PubMed,
and ISI-Thompson. The languages in which
these journals are edited were determined.
Forty-three Brazilian scientific medical
journals published from November 2003 to
February 2004 were selected. All 33 peri-
odicals from the SciELO database and ten
additional Portuguese language periodicals,
available at the Library of the Faculty of
Medicine, Universidade Federal de Minas
Gerais (UFMG), indexed only in LILACS
and selected by a simple randomization
method were analyzed. The SciELO-based
journals were further divided into three