Visibility of scientific journals: A study based on the Website of Scientific Journals at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

The study addresses the visibility of electronic scientific journals, as well as the characteristics that promote, especially focusing on those hosted on the Portal of Scientific Journals of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. The study assesses the degree of visibility of these journals on the Internet by means of their presence in information sources. The theoretical reference addresses the following themes: scientific communication; scientific journals; visibility and searchability; information sources on portal; bibliographic databases and open access. This is a descriptive and exploratory study that combines qualitative and quantitative data. The corpus of research was composed of 34 titles. Essential information about the journals was collected, giving emphasis to the characteristics that promote their visibility. It was found that Human Sciences is the area with the greatest number of journals at the University, 29.4% of all publications. Open access is adopted by all journals in the sample. Once the information sources had been mapped, it was found that the majority of journals appear in the information source Latin American Periodicals Tables of Contents, followed by Latindex. Despite the limited presence of the journals in international information sources, it was concluded that the journals hosted on the Website of Scientific Journals seek to adapt to characteristics that promote their visibility. The study suggests a number of new studies, deepens the analyses, and addresses other themes related to visibility and, especially, bibliometric studies.