SPELL: Ten years of contribution to science

Ten Years ago, the Brazilian scientific community gained the indexing system SPELL!

Spell was created in 2012 as an electronic library of scientific research to organize, offer access, and disseminate studies published in scientific journals. It counts on approximately 64,000 indexed documents and has more than 43 million accesses that significantly contributed to scientific research. Around 4,000 studies published in the 139 indexed journals are included in the database each year. As an electronic repository, SPELL offers free access to indexed articles, leading to over 15 million downloads.

As of 2015, SPELL began to calculate the impact index of indexed journals, using the following indices:

• The average number of references per article
• Impact (2 and 5 years)
• Immediacy index
• Self-citation rate
• Impact (2 years without self-citation)
• Impact (5 years without self-citation)
• Citation half-life, and
• H-index

Thanks to these efforts, in 2017, the journal impact index generated by SPELL became part of the quality criteria in the classification of journals by Qualis/Capes in the fields of public and business administration, accounting, and tourism (called in the Brazilian agency CAPES as “Area 27”). The Quadrennial Assessment Report 2017-2020 published by CAPES, which details the definitions of assessment parameters, recognized SPELL’s impact index as a consolidated metric.

Over these past ten years, SPELL has offered an undeniable contribution to the dissemination of scientific production!

Many improvements will come! A path is opened for the indexing of foreign journals, as well as of Brazilian journals in areas related to Administration, Accounting, and Tourism in SPELL. We will work incessantly so that many projects come true!

We’ll keep you posted!

Article written by Simone L. L. Rafael (ANPAD)