Open Access and Bibliometric Data: Odovtos-Int.J.Dent.Sc.

In the context of cataloging scientific production, bibliometrics allows performing the analysis of the publications and citations of a journal to have a broader context of its productivity and to be able to establish future strategies. Considering the paramount perspectives for the academic arena, the citation analysis evaluates the impact and assumed quality of an article, a journal, an author, or an institution based on the number of times they have been cited. Thus, an editor-in-chief to allure high-quality research must require to design a strategy to transform the visibility and transcendence of a journal.

In retrospect, in late 2015, I was designated as Editor-in-chief of Odovtos. My first mission was to update past editions, build up in OJS the electronic version of the journal, and modify it into a quarterly periodicity with a continuous publication system named as Online-First. Moreover, English was established as the main language of our journal, despite being from an academic editorial in a Spanish-speaking country, Costa Rica. As a result, we were included in the Emerging Sources of Citation Index (ESCI) of the Journal Citation Report™ (JCR) from Clarivate Analytics (2018), SCIELO Citation Index (2018), SCOPUS (2022), and in more than 10 additional databases that allow us worldwide coverage.

Each year, the JCR provides a summary of the network of scholarly citations from the prior year of Web of Science™ coverage. For nearly 50 years, publishers, institutions, funders, and researchers have relied on the data in the JCR to identify and evaluate the world’s leading journals. JCR includes mainly 21,494 journals from 113 countries across five continents and 254 research categories in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Specifically, the category of Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine (2021) included 158 journals, of which 92 displayed the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the remaining 66 journals were included via ESCI implementing as metric the Journal Citation Indicator™ (JCI). Formerly, as described in a previous editorial, the data displayed on the journal's JCR website in 2015 demonstrated zero (n=0) citations. Currently, Odovtos’s rank by JCI in the category: Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine in 2021 JCR Year is 135/158, JCI 0.15, Quartile Q4, Percentile: 14.87.

Moreover, the Scimago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database by Elsevier. In this database, the journals can be grouped into 27 major thematic areas, with 309 specific subject categories or by country. Citation data is drawn from over 34,100 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers and country performance metrics from 239 countries worldwide. This database has in the category of Dentistry 275 journals, of which just ten (10) are from Latin America, specifically 8 from Brazil, 1 from Chile, and Odovtos from Costa Rica. Additionally, pursuant to the Google Scholar algorithm Odovtos displayed 475 citations, 468 since 2016. Nowadays, our journal i10-index is 17.

As your editor-in-chief, I concede that the sum of the data corroborates that our vision and actions are collecting visibility and acknowledgment. In terms of recognition, what does it mean that a journal that belongs to a third-world country, from a public university, and that does not belong to a large company or publisher is being considered to be ranked with Journal Impact Factor by JCR? This could only mean that an ethical model of open access, such as ours, with no article processing charge (APC) fee, just with the compromise to disseminate transcendental knowledge and research to the world, could be the IDEAL MODEL to DEMOCRATIZE SCIENCE. This is no matter of being part of a wealthy or unwealthy institution or country. In the end, with the COVID-19 pandemic’s prolific scientific response and lessons learned, the world recognizes the importance to maintain a global sustainable health system. That being said, the current public health politics establishment requires an ethical and non-profit open-access model, in which we all can contribute and have access to the data to promote a worldwide scientific chain. As scientists, we must reflect to democratize science, and health, to promote equity in quality and life expectancy regardless of the geographical area where we were born.

Sincerely,

Jessie Reyes-Carmona DDS, MSD, PhD¹

1. Editor-in-Chief, Odovtos International Journal of Dental Sciences, Universidad de Costa Rica.

San José, Costa Rica.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2872-6623

Email: jessie.reyes@ucr.ac.cr