The Qualis system: a perspective from a multidisciplinary journal

Abstract

There is quite an amount of literature out there regarding the Qualis system and one wonders what someone can write about it that has not been discussed already. In this short essay, I will show the perspective of a multidisciplinary journal that has to live (or survive) in the very complex environment created by Qualis and the generated deleterious side effects for periodicals with broad scopes like that of the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (AABC).The Qualis system was introduced in 1998 by CAPES (Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior), an agency of the Brazilian government whose purpose is to evaluate and foster the Brazilian graduate programs (e.g., Andrade and Galembeck 2009). Right from the beginning, it was clear that one of the major aspects of a graduate program are publications by both, researchers and students. Since the amount of produced papers is high, a system had to be developed to discriminate this production (e.g., Barata 2016). This is how Qualis got into the picture. Essentially, this system classifies publications in strata that are further used to evaluate a particular graduate program. This system has been changed along the years, and presently there are eight levels: A1 and A2, the highest; B1 to B5; and C, the lowest that does not add anything for the evaluation process. So far so good, if it were not for a small detail: the percentage of A1 + A2 cannot be more than 25% of all periodicals evaluated. Moreover, the percentage of A1 + A2 + B1 cannot be over half the periodicals that are taken into consideration in a given year (e.g., Rocha-e-Silva 2009). I will come back to this later.As known, the AABC is the sole periodical produced in Brazil that can be regarded as truly multidisciplinary, publishing articles from physics and mathematics, to paleontology and scientometrics, passing through the description of new species (biodiversity), research of new chemical compounds, studies that could lead to the cure of diseases, and new methodologies applied to engineering, just to cite a few. No wonder our journal appears in several different areas evaluated by CAPES, that are now slightly less than 50 (Barata 2016). Since 2010, the AABC is listed in 28 (2011) up to 39 (2016) areas with quite some variation regarding the strata. For example, in the last Qualis list (2016), the classification of the AABC fluctuates from A2 (e.g., Anthropology/ Archaeology; Agrarian Sciences) to B5 (Biological Sciences I and II). Just a reminder: B5 is close to nothing in the present evaluation system.

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