[Impact and prestige indicators of SciELO network health sciences journals: comparative study.]

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics and scientific journal evaluation.
• Health sciences research assessment.

Background:

• Bibliometric indicators are standard for evaluating scientific journal quality.
• Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are primary sources for these indicators.
• SciELO offers unique indicators for Ibero-American science, often underrepresented in WoS and Scopus.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the association between SciELO's health sciences journal indicators and widely used impact/prestige metrics.
• To evaluate the complementarity of existing prestige indicators with impact indicators.

Main Methods:

• An analytical correlational study was conducted using 2018 data.
• Statistical analyses included chi-square tests, ANOVA, Pearson's correlation, and Spearman's coefficient.
• Significance level was set at α≤0.05.

Main Results:

• SciELO Impact Factor showed weak correlations with Journal Citation Report (R=0.36) and Scopus Cite Score (R=0.39).
• Associations between Web of Science/Scopus H-indexes and SciELO H-index were also weak (R=0.45 and R=0.340, respectively).

Conclusions:

• SciELO indicators for health journals lack significant association with WoS or Scopus metrics.
• SciELO Impact Factor is a necessary tool for evaluating non-mainstream journals, especially from Latin America.
• The study did not prove the necessity of prestige indicators to supplement impact indicators.