Abstract
Rodriguésia was influenced by transformations occurred in science throughout the last decade, in part due to the globalization process, the indexing through impact levels, and the crescent attention received by the biodiversity conservation. This article describes the evolution of Rodriguésia, based on papers published in there from 1935 to 2008. Publications were evaluated regarding its respective botanical area; language; the country and institutions of authors and co-authors; the amount and origin of citations received by Rodriguésia, and finally, its impact factor and h-index. The most studied botanical areas varied from taxonomy to floristic surveys and plant anatomy. Around 86% of the authors belonged to Brazilian scientific institutions. According to the ISI Web of Knowledge, Rodriguésia received 483 citations, with 83.7% of them from articles written in English against 10.6% written in Portuguese. The Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências and Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden are the periodicals that cited Rodriguésia the most. The estimated ISI-impact factor of Rodriguésia to 2008 was 0.152 and the h-index was 7. This paper discusses how the citation potential of papers on classical descriptive botanical areas could be improved on its respective quality and relevance, due to changes in the structure of the journal. We believe that with contextualization and discussion of results, such papers could attract more citations and enhance our knowledge on the plant diversity conservation.
Key words:
scientometrics; impact factor; bibliometric indexes; h-index; scientific journal