On the shoulders of giants

Nos ombros de gigantes

Becoming Arquivos Brasileiros de Oftalmologia (ABO) chief-editor in 2010 was one of the most prestigious invitations that I ever received. The idea of following my mentor and forever professor Dr. Harley Bicas in this task was overwhelming. Dr. Bicas assumed his position after the Belfort Family had created the most important Latin American ophthalmological journal. The Belforts (Waldemar, Rubens Senior and Rubens Junior) were responsible for the early Herculean days, where they had to seek for authors and publications while making the effort to maintain the high standards set by themselves. Their capacity to keep the journal's periodicity through many difficulties, political and financial, as well as their altruism in donating the ABO to the Brazilian Council of Ophthalmology (CBO) created the legacy of the family. But this was not all. While in the Administrative Board of ABO, Rubens Junior keeps helping the journal, setting goals and pushing the editors to innovate, always based in the most respected values of valorization of good science, virtue and ethics.

Dr. Bicas was responsible for creating the structure of the journal, defining the editorial basic rules for publications and peer reviewing. He invited a group of excellent committed associated editors that had to cope with his impulse for perfection. With his passion for Mathematics and the Portuguese language he would make every single paper undergo his scrutiny, which was not an easy task for the authors.

To be or not to be

When I became editor, my first question to the board was about the language to be used in ABO. Until 2010 the journal would have his articles published in Portuguese with titles and abstract translated to English. Knowing that this was a sensitive question to Dr. Bicas, we discussed it lengthily. The administrative board allowed me to switch to English with abstracts in Portuguese⁽¹⁾. It meant to reorganize all our written materials, such as instructions for authors, submission interfaces, and all internal communication to English. It was not an easy job, considering that, although the great majority of the scientists in Brazil are fluent in English, it is not our second language. I begun creating a 100% web-based submission platform and rationalizing our Internet channels. After a few years, with the help of SciELO^®, we were one of the first Brazilian journals to migrate to the Scholar One platform and were able to further improve and optimize the submission system⁽²⁾. We then professionalize scientific editing, having all manuscripts edited internationally. To avoid delaying the publication process, I assumed personally the post-editing suggestions for every single manuscript, as well as the translation to Portuguese of all titles and abstracts. I believe I also have some of my mentor's obsession for perfection...

Ethics

Continuing to reinforce the tenants of Belfort family legacy, based on the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), we created the policy for disclosure of conflict of interests, and for authorship de finition^(3,4). Our policy became strict regarding IRB approval, as well as Clinical Trials registry. But our biggest step was to screen all papers for plagiarism. As ABO was the first Brazilian Scientific Journal to screen all papers for plagiarism, we had to create internal policies to evaluate the reports created by Ithenticate^®5,6). With the implementation of all these policies, the ABO ethics and transparency had achieved the highest standards⁽⁷⁾.

Learning everyday with the amazing team of editors

During these seven years I had the opportunity to interact with an amazing group of associate editors. Not only they kept up with their tasks but also brought innumerous questions to be discussed. I have learned from them, methodology, statistics, style, guidelines, standards, bibliometrics, etc. All discussions had lead to the final ABO policies, and created a Culture for Meritocracy⁽⁸⁾. Brazil has a continental area that creates difficulties and opportunities. We had to make our meetings effective in standardizing our editors' assessments. Most of our meetings were used to discuss real articles and evaluate them based on some simple points: does the article raise a relevant question? Does it have a valid hypothesis? Does the methodology used is capable of detecting the expected results? Were the results presented clearly? All answers had to be yes in order to the article to follow the editorial process⁽⁹⁾. After peer-revision, editors would reject approximately half of the submitted papers and the ones that followed the editorial process would have a final answer in an average of 45 days.

Results achieved

The mathematics of journal ranking can be very tricky. The general idea is straightforward: if a significant percentage of the articles published in a specific journal is frequently cited, the journal will achieve high indexes. Nevertheless, reality may be different. As a matter of fact, even highly ranked journals will have many articles that are poorly cited, which is even more critical for the averaged ranked journals. The editor's job is look into all submitted articles and find some that may generate impact in the scientific knowledge and, therefore, receive citations. Most of the articles published in ABO will never be cited, but some may make a difference. I can appro ximate that during theses 7 years I may have screened more than a thousand manuscripts with a rough acceptance rate of 50%. It feels like gold mining, reading an article that has being the first to address or presented alternative creative approaches to answer determined scientific questions. Thanks to our esteemed authors, many articles on Zika Virus published at ABO^(10-12), as well as other interesting papers^(13-15), generated an im portant increase in our rankings during these 7 years (Figures 1 and 2). Thanks to the work of the previous editors, ABO achieved many credentials, such as being the only Latin American ophthalmological journal listed in JCR^® and available at PubMed^®16). Keeping the journal's ideal of free access, allowed us to be easily available at SciELO^® and at one-click from PubMed^®16). (Figure 3).

Figure 1
ABO - Arquivos Brasileiros de Oftalmologia Impact Factor^® from 2010 through 2017. The impact factor (IF) from a specific year (Y) is calculated by dividing the number of cited papers (CP) in the specific year that have been published in the previous 2 years by the number of citable published papers (CPP) in the same period (IF=CP/CPP). For example, 2017 IF is the fraction between the number of citations in 2017 related to papers published in 2015-2016 by the number of published papers in the same period.

Figure 2
ABO - Arquivos Brasileiros de Oftalmologia cited papers from 2010 through 2017.

Figure 3
ABO - Arquivos Brasileiros de Oftalmologia relationship with other journals. Manuscripts published in journals represented in the circular graph have cited ABO in 2017. Source: InCites^® Journal Citation Reports dataset updated June 6, 2018.

Future of scientific communication

The amount of information available to the society nowadays shadows the perception of knowledge that one is able to achieve during a lifespan. There are more than 2.5 million documents in clinical medicine at the Web of Science database alone. With the advance of purely digital journals, the length of a manuscript is not a problem for the publishers anymore - bytes are cheap - the lack of space limits for publication may expose readers to unnecessarily lengthy materials, toughening even more absorption of information. Awarding the number of pu blications associated to unlimited publication oppor tunities has led science to a dangerous context where its validity has been questioned⁽¹⁷⁾ and to avoidable data dredging as well as "p-hacking" generating suspicious excess of statistically significant results⁽¹⁸⁾.

This excess of opportunities to publish and the lack of reasonable time to critically analyze them makes an Editor's work similar to a broker, helping the reader to save time and absorb as much useful information as possible.

This is what I have learned from the Giants.

• Funding: No specific financial support was available for this study.

REFERENCES

• ¹
  Chamon W. The language issue in Brazilian ophthalmological journals. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2013;76(1):V-VIII. Comment in: Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2013:76(1):21-5.
• ²
  Chamon W. ABO entered ScholarOne system. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2012;75(4):231-4.
• ³
  Chamon W, Melo LA Jr, Paranhos A Jr. [Declaration of conflict of interest in presentations and scientific publications]. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2010;73(2):107-9. Portuguese.
• ⁴
  Chamon W. Fine prints at the bottom of the page. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2013;76(3):v-vi.
• ⁵
  Chamon W. Plagiarism and misconduct in research: where we are and what we can do. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2013;76(6):V-VIII. Comment in: Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2014;77(2):133.
• ⁶
  Chamon W, Dantas PE. What is plagiarism after all? Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2016;79(2):V-VI.
• ⁷
  Chamon W. Passion, publication, promotion and payment: which "Ps" drive scientists? Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2012;75(6):383-4.
• ⁸
  Chamon W, Melo LA Jr. Impact factor and insertion of the ABO in the world scientific literature. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2011;74(4):241-2.
• ⁹
  Moraes HV Jr, Rocha EM, Chamon W. [Operation and performance of the peer-review system]. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2010;73(6):487-8. Portuguese.
• ¹⁰
  Ventura CV, Maia M, Ventura BV, Linden VV, Araújo EB, Ramos RC, et al. Ophthalmological findings in infants with microcephaly and presumable intra-uterus Zika virus infection. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2016;79(1):1-3.
• ¹¹
  Campos AG, Lira RP, Arantes TE. Optical coherence tomography of macular atrophy associated with microcephaly and presumed intrauterine Zika virus infection. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2016;79(6):400-1. Comment in: Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2017;80(2):137; Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2017.80(2):138.
• ¹²
  Fontes BM. Zika virus-related hypertensive iridocyclitis. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2016;79(1):63.
• ¹³
  Valbon BF, Ambrósio R Jr, Fontes BM, Alves MR. Effects of age on corneal deformation by non-contact tonometry integrated with an ultra-high-speed (UHS) Scheimpflug camera. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 213;76(4):229-32.
• ¹⁴
  Bottos KM, Schor P, Dreyfuss JL, Nader HB, Chamon W. Effect of corneal epithelium on ultraviolet-A and riboflavin absorption. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2011;74(5):348-51.
• ¹⁵
  Berra M, Galperín G, Dawidowski L, Tau J, Márquez I, Berra A. Impact of wildfire smoke in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on ocular surface. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2015;78(2):110-4.
• ¹⁶
  Bicas HE, Chamon W. About price and value of scientific publications: criticism or indignation? Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2012;75(3): 157-8.
• ¹⁷
  Peng, R. The reproducibility crisis in science: a statistical counterattack significance [Internet]. 2015[cited 2018 jun 21];30-2. Available from: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00827.x
  » https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00827.x
• ¹⁸
  Ronald L. Wasserstein RL, Lazar NA. The ASA's Statement on p-Values: context, process, and purpose. Am Stat [Internet]. 2016 [cited 2018 Jan 24];70(2):129-33. Available from: https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108#.W4cURPZFy74
  » https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108#.W4cURPZFy74

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Nov-Dec 2018

History

• Received
  15 July 2018
• Accepted
  20 July 2018