Brazilian Journal of Occupational Health: visibility, impact, social reach, and developmental challengesAbstract
The Brazilian Journal of Occupational Health (RBSO) celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. This editorial note aims to present bibliometric indicators and elements of RBSO’s social reach, as well as discussing the challenges for its growth. The journal shows a continuous upward trend in accesses to published articles, with an average number of accesses per published document three times higher than that of Brazilian Collective Health journals. Furthermore, although its scope - Occupational Health - is a specific area of Public Health, in recent years RBSO has ranked among the 50 most cited Portuguese-language journals, considering journals from all scientific areas evaluated by Google Scholar Metrics. RBSO is also a reference for the scientific community and the social and institutional actors working in the field of occupational safety and health. These include the Labor Courts, which have handed down hundreds of rulings citing information from articles published in RBSO. The main challenges include increasing the number of articles published, ensuring their scientific quality and social relevance, and obtaining new international indexing, always in line with the rapid and intense changes in the world of work and scientific publishing.
Keywords:
Bibliometrics; Publishing; Academic Communication; Occupational Health
Resumo
A Revista Brasileira de Saúde Ocupacional (RBSO) completou 50 anos de existência, em 2023. Esta nota editorial objetiva apresentar indicadores bibliométricos e elementos do alcance social da RBSO, além de discutir os desafios para o seu crescimento. O periódico apresenta tendência contínua de aumento nos acessos aos artigos publicados, com o número médio de acessos por documento publicado três vezes maior do que aquele das revistas de Saúde Coletiva brasileiras. Outrossim, embora seu escopo – a Saúde do Trabalhador – seja uma área específica da Saúde Coletiva, a RBSO classificou-se, nos últimos anos, entre os 50 periódicos em língua portuguesa mais citados, considerando revistas de todas as áreas científicas avaliadas pelo Google Scholar Metrics. A RBSO também é referência para a comunidade científica e os atores sociais e institucionais que atuam no âmbito da segurança e saúde do trabalhador. Entre eles, a Justiça do Trabalho, que já proferiu centenas de sentenças citando informações dos artigos publicados na RBSO. Entre os principais desafios, incluem-se o aumento no número de artigos publicados, assegurando sua qualidade científica e relevância social, e a obtenção de novas indexações internacionais, sempre em consonância com as rápidas e intensas mudanças no mundo do trabalho e da editoração científica.
Palavras-chave:
Bibliometria; Editoração; Comunicação Acadêmica; Saúde do Trabalhador
Introduction
The mission of the Brazilian Journal of Occupational Health (Revista Brasileira de Saúde Ocupacional - RBSO) is to disseminate
original research articles on Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) whose content will contribute to the understanding and improvement of working conditions, to the prevention of accidents and occupational diseases, and to subsidize the discussion and definition of public policies related to the subject1.
RBSO, created in 1973, recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, an important milestone and a feat achieved by few Brazilian scientific journals2,3. Among Brazilian journals in the field of public health, RBSO is one of the longest-lived. Only the Revista de Saúde Pública, from the School of Public Health of the University of São Paulo, created in 19674, is older than RBSO.
RBSO’s inclusion in the Scientific Electronic Library On-line (SciELO) Brazil collection in 20125gave the journal a major boost. Nevertheless, there are limits to the journal’s development, from those related to its very nature as a journal dedicated to the niche of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) within the thriving field of Collective Health, to those imposed by the evaluation systems for journals and scientific production, both internationally and in Brazil6.
This editorial note aims to describe some indicators of visibility and bibliometric impact, as well as elements of the RBSO’s social reach, and to discuss the existing challenges for the journal’s continued growth, in the context of the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary. It was prepared and updated based on the presentation made by the executive editor Eduardo Garcia Garcia during the RBSO editorial board meeting on August 31, 20237.
Visibility
According to Packer and Meneghini (2006), visibility is the “[...] exposure capacity that a source or flow of information has to, on the one hand, influence its target audience and, on the other, be accessed in response to a demand for information”8. To achieve visibility, an electronic journal must reach members of a community in search of information. In this context, the visibility of a scientific publication is an indication of its recognition9.
RBSO was created as a printed journal. In 2012, it began to be published on the SciELO Portal, in open access. In 2016, when continuous publication was adopted, the journal began publishing exclusively in online format. Publication in open access is one of the main attributes of journal visibility. Another important attribute is indexing. In 2025, RBSO is indexed in: SciELO Brazil Collection, Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal (REDALYC), Latin American and Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences (LILACS), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Sistema Regional de Información en Línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal (LATINDEX), Red Panamericana de Información en Salud Ambiental/Biblioteca Virtual en Desarrollo Sostenible y Salud Ambiental (REPIDISCA/BVSDE), CAB Abstracts, Free Medical Journals, Global Health, Fatcat, Miguilim, Sudoc, Wikidata, ZDB Zeitschriften Datenbank and, recently, Scopus, the largest international database of scientific journals.
The journal’s main language of publication is Portuguese. However, manuscripts in English and Spanish are also welcomed. Currently, all accepted articles are published in bilingual format, Portuguese-English or Spanish-English, depending on the original language submitted. The translations are free of charge for the authors, as a strategy to increase visibility, recognizing the greater reach of English as the main language in scientific publications globally, but also preserving the text in the original language, which facilitates local user access to the published information. The editors see publication in Portuguese as essential to its social role, ensuring greater accessibility for its expanded target audience in Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries, as well as maintaining Brazilian scientific sovereignty.
Also contributing to RBSO’s visibility is its extensive and diverse editorial board in terms of gender distribution, sub-areas of knowledge, and geographical distribution, as well as of the articles` authors. The fact that the journal is published by the Jorge Duprat Figueiredo Foundation for Occupational Safety and Medicine (Fundacentro), a Brazilian reference institution in the field of OSH, is another factor that contributes to its visibility.
According to data from SciELO, in the three-year period from 2021 to 2023, the average number (2,161) of accesses per document published in RBSO is three times higher than that of the Collective Health journals as a whole (693)10.
Figure 1 shows the number of accesses to documents published in the RBSO, showing continuous growth after the journal joined the SciELO Brazil Collection in May 2012. Considering the full years, accesses jumped from around 300,000 in 2013 (average of 10,000/month) to almost 900,000 in 2024 (average of 75,000/month). In 2025, it is estimated that accesses will exceed one million, as in the first half of the year alone, the average number of accesses exceeded 95,000/month.
Figure 2 illustrates the geographical origin of accesses to RBSO documents on the SciELO database in 2024.
In 2024, of the total number of accesses (896,117), Brazil provided 63% (563,085). Europe contributed 23% (209,058), with the Netherlands and Belgium standing out with over 90,000 accesses each, and Portugal with around 9,000. In North America, the USA was the highlight, with 5% (49,722) of accesses. Asia accounted for 3% of accesses (27,267), with China standing out (12,741). There were 9,315 accesses from Africa, mainly from the Portuguese-speaking countries of Mozambique and Angola, with around 3,500 accesses each. Similarly, there were 9,061 accesses from Hispano-America, especially Argentina (2,088). Around the world, accesses were recorded from at least 142 countries. The international visibility of the journal provided by the SciELO database is evident.
The fact that RBSO does not charge fees for submission, publication, and access to the full content published, characterizing it as a diamond open access journal, probably also contributes to its visibility. This attracts readers and the interest of potential authors, especially at a time when several Brazilian journals are starting to charge fees, and while paying to publish in foreign journals is quite expensive11,12.
Bibliometric impact
Google Scholar Metrics is used as an alternative tool to the impact factor for evaluating scientific journals, especially those not indexed in the Web of Science. There is an upward trend in the RBSO’s bibliometric impact measured by the H5 indicator provided by Google Scholar Metrics (Figure 3). In 2025, the journal ranked 46th among Portuguese-language journals in all areas, with H5 = 22 and median = 52.
The Table 1 compares Brazilian public health journals that also publish articles on occupational health, using the H5 index and the number of articles in this field that contributed to this H index in 2025 (2020-2024 period). The comparison shows the small number of articles on occupational health that generally participate in the H5 index in public health journals. This shows that the number of citations for occupational health articles is generally lower than for other public health topics. It also shows the reach of RBSO which, despite not yet being indexed in the major international databases during the reference period, publishing most of its articles only in Portuguese and publishing fewer articles than general public health journals, receives enough citations to be among the top 50 most cited journals in Portuguese.
Social reach
An example of the RBSO’s social reach is the citation of articles published in it in documents from the Superior Labor Court13. From January 2009 to September 2025, 587 judgments cite RBSO, including 339 Court rulings and 248 single-judge decisions, in addition to three decisions by the vice-presidency. The subject of the most frequently cited articles is rural work. However, different topics are also mentioned, such as repetitive strain injuries (RSI) and telemarketing, among others. For example, in a case involving a telemarketing worker, it says: “[...] Brazilian Journal of Occupational Health published an article [...]” (citing the title of an article of the telemarketing dossier - v.31, n.114, p.35-46, 2006).
They then transcribe around seven paragraphs of the article and concludes:
[...] Thus, ... the presence of risk factors in the plaintiff’s work environment is verified for the occurrence of the pathological and symptomatic manifestations that she manifested.
Consideringf all this, in accordance with article 436 of the CPC (CLT, article 769), the Court partially rejects the expert’s conclusion reached in these proceedings, in view of the abundant and irrefutable documentation attached to the case file, which points to the existence of a causal link between the pathologies diagnosed in the plaintiff and the work carried out at the defendant. This documentation, together with the applicable legislation, demonstrates that the expert’s conclusion is premature, fragile, and superficial, as it is divorced from the reality of the plaintiff’s state of health [...].
[...] Therefore, I reinstate the original judgment to recognize the causal link between the illness manifested by the plaintiff and the work activity carried out at the defendant. [...]
From this example, it is possible to infer that the article cited contributed to supporting the judge’s decision in favor of the plaintiff worker, despite the existence of an expert report unfavorable to their claim.
The articles published in RBSO generally cover socially relevant content. Corroborating this finding, three articles were recently selected for publication by the Bori Agency, that collaborates with the press by providing advance information on relevant research in all areas of knowledge. The RBSO published articles were one on racial inequalities in mortality due to work accidents14, another on sugarcane workers15, and a third one on child labor16, the latter being one of the most impactful among those disclosed by Bori, with 200 immediate repercussions in the press. Moreover, the journal is also dedicated to encouraging debate on public policies of interest to occupational health, such as the highly cited editorial on workers’ health and COVID-1917, as well as the one on the prospects for ratification of the International Labor Organization’s Convention No. 190, aimed at combating violence and harassment in the world of work18. This approach, aimed at uncovering social problems and contributing to improving the social situation, is shared by Collective Health journals.
Challenges for RBSO development
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing RBSO today is to increase the number of manuscripts published. Despite being indexed in SciELO in 2012, an improvement in the Qualis Capes classification since then and a relative increase in submissions, the proportion of articles accepted by the journal is still less than 10%. Some factors can be put forward as possible explanations, as discussed by the editors6:
[...] although scientific production in Occupational Health is growing, the number of studies produced in the area is relatively small.
RBSO is the mirror of a complex interdisciplinary area, which coexists with marked contrasts between types of scientific approach, ... as well as portraying the [poor] scientific training of professionals working in the area, leading to high rejection rates for manuscripts submitted for evaluation.
Furthermore, as it belongs to the broad Collective Health field, the journal finds itself in a paradoxical situation, which has long been detected by its editors, i.e. articles of higher scientific quality and by renowned authors are sent to the journals best classified, which is also reflected in the high level of rejection in RBSO.
The high rejection rates of articles submitted to the journal reflect the insufficient quality of most submissions. It is common for authors not specialized in OSH to submit manuscripts to RBSO with superficial and conceptually mistaken approaches. In submitted articles reporting quantitative studies, statistical and methodological errors are often found, which are reasons for rejection at the screening stage19.
The relatively smaller scientific production and, consequently, the limited number of articles published in the field of workers’ health/occupational health, also contributes to the lower number of articles published by RBSO, in relation to the much larger scope of Collective Health/Public Health as a whole.
To encourage quality article submissions, the journal strategies are based mainly on the publication of thematic dossiers, with public calls for articles submission and peer review, which brings researchers in the field closer together. Dissemination actions are also carried out through social networks, as well as the dissemination of the journal to Graduate Programs remembering that RBSO is an open-access journal, which does not charge fees for submission, publication, or translation of articles.
In Brazil, RBSO is the pioneering scientific journal in the publication and dissemination of solely OSH-related articles. The specificity of the subject gives it a fundamentally important niche as a communication channel and source of information and dissemination of the subject to society and as a reference for the scientific production of the academic community working in the field6.
By bringing together and disseminating the knowledge produced in the field of Occupational Health over the last 52 years, the journal not only brings together the knowledge evolution in this field over the last few decades, but also provides a fundamental space for scientific reflection and analysis of contemporary problems related to the subject and the prospects for tackling them. This makes an important contribution to its content being considered relevant to those researching and working in the area. It also contributes to the analysis and proposal of public policies aimed at protecting the workers’ health, thus justifying the continuous pursuit of its editorial improvement.
Journals in areas such as public health, medicine, epidemiology, toxicology, nursing, psychology, dentistry, engineering, chemistry, the environment, sociology, education, economics, administration, law, and other subjects and disciplines occasionally publish articles related to OSH, focusing on the topic from the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework inherent to each discipline. There are also a few journals focused on the theme of work, but with broader scopes, as well as on occupational medicine, which has more restricted interfaces with the field of OSH. Thus, in Brazil, RBSO concentrates scientific production focused specifically on the subject, assuming the intrinsically multidisciplinary nature of the topic and covering the various areas of knowledge related to OSH, with interfaces in the human, social, exact, biological, health, and other sciences. Internationally, the field of OSH is also covered by journals from different areas, and which have a segmented spectrum of publications by the different disciplines that deal with health and work relations.
Another important challenge faced by scientific journals, in general, is the difficulty in obtaining the collaboration of ad hoc referees to peer review. This is no different at RBSO. Over the years, the number of invitations needed to get one opinion has increased. Obtaining high-quality reviews is essential to guarantee the scientific quality of the content published by journals. This difficulty also has an impact on article processing and publication times7. However, adjustments to the editorial flow and particular attention from the editorial management team and the body of associate editors have helped to reduce processing times. The time between approval and publication of articles in RBSO has also decreased considerably since the second half of 2024, with the hiring of a new company responsible for carrying out the editorial production stages (proofreading and translation of texts, standardization, layout, and production of XML files).
Despite the challenges, RBSO reaffirms that it will continue to promote scientific publishing within its scope, with the aim of promoting and qualifying the debate in the face of rapid and intense changes in the world of work and scientific publishing. The efforts intensification to the journal development is highlighted, in order to further increase the publication of articles that report “results on the impact, intervention, formulation, and evaluation of public policies interested in promoting the workers’ health”20. In this context, the RBSO editorial team calls on the OSH community to collaborate in strengthening the journal.
References
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