Last September 15, 2017, the Colombian National Abstracting and Indexing System for Serial Publications in Science, Technology and Innovation, Publindex, published the results of the announcement No. 768 for 2016, “Announcement for Indexing of Specialized Colombian Scientific Journals - Publindex”, which measured the national scientific journals by enforcing the criterion of visibility and impact of national journals based on:

This can be seen in table 1 (page 7, Terms of Reference of Publindex 768 call), which describes impact criteria for each classification category for scientific journals.

Table 1 Impact criteria to categorize scientific journals 

Either way (Quartile in Scopus/Web of Science or H5 of Google Scholar), due to the recent indexation of our journal in Scopus and its H5 value, we were ranked in the C category. All those journals that were not indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science indices and which did not reach the threshold defined by H5 (citations in Google Scholar) by area of knowledge, were not recognized by Publindex.

As a result, of the more than 500 Colombian scientific journals that were recognized by Publindex until 2015, only 244 remain ranked by Colciencias; of these, one was ranked in the A1 category (this was the journal Análisis Político), and the great majority of the journals that were recognized by Publindex are now concentrated in categories B and C (table 2).

In this new model, the journal Corpoica Ciencia y Tecnología Agropecuaria was ranked in the C category.

In view of the above, it is important to bear in mind that the change from category A2 to category C, rather than representing a loss for the journal, should be seen as an achievement in the midst of a paradigm shift in the measurement of science seeking to align itself with global trends.

On the other hand, the scientific journals in the area of agricultural sciences that were recognized by Publindex in Colombia are the following:

Table 2 Scientific journals in agricultural scientific areas recognized by Publindex 

The competition for advancement in this system of quartiles is highly unequal and represents a challenge that must be taken with care. For this reason, the editorial team of our journal will carry out, among others, the following actions:

Another important aspect that we must implement as a result of the new Publindex policies established is the compliance of the exogamy criterion, in which the number of articles by external authors must be of 80%. In other words, the number of articles by corporate authors in the Journal cannot exceed 20 % annually).

At this moment, our Journal has already reached the percentage of endogamy allowed for the year 2018, so contributions from authors who work at Corpoica and that arrive from now on, can only be published until 2019, giving priority to those manuscripts that have the highest number of external authors and by order in which they are received.

Contributions from corporate authors are received only with a minimum external co-authoring of 50 %. Articles that are solely written by corporate authors will not be accepted.

We appreciate your understanding and hope to have the collaboration of the entire corporate community in order to achieve the progressive ascent of our journal in Scopus and a prompt indexation of our journal in the Web of Science online database.