Editorial

On Quartiles and Mainstream

Universitas Psychologica entered Thomson-Reuters' Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in Quartile 2 with an Impact Factor (IF) of 1.283, the highest for a multidisciplinary journal in Latin America and the second highest in Iberoamerica. The JCR is a tool that presents the citation indicator for a journal and allows the Editor to track the dynamics of content usage. The Editor can use this information to make scientific and editorial management decisions, and researchers can use it to learn about the prestige and confidence other researchers deposit on the knowledge carried by the journal, and therefore it may guide the researcher's decisions on where to publish, as researchers want their knowledge to have greater visibility.

It is clear that citations are an important indicator of academic usage of knowledge. It is also important to emphasize that citation frequency does not lead to a complete understanding of this usage, and that we need to identify when the citations are made, where do they come from (authors, institutions, journals, and books), and even who makes them and what their context is.

The complexity of this subject led, over 40 years ago, to the development of the Impact Factor (IF). Garfield developed a simple way to assess the impact of a journal in an academic community by relating the number of citations achieved by a journal to the number of articles in a given timeframe. Nevertheless, this first formula, while simple, does not account for a certain community's practices, for example, and it is clear that historians, philosophers and sociologists do not behave in the same way that medical doctors or physicists do. However, it has been useful as an indication of knowledge usage. The problem lies on the use of this indicator as an absolute marker of prestige, and this is done by the communities which produce, use and manage research.

In this sense, several indicators have been developed in order to assess journals, which not only compare journals in their own areas (SNIP), but also give differential weights to the origin of the citation (SJR). It is clear that it is not the same to get a citation from a higher impact journal in its community than from other.

This brings us to the relevance of quartile organization within the categories, which enables the identification of ranks, instead of discrete values, for placing a journal in comparison with other journals in its area. A 4^th quartile journal may carry less dense dialogues in a certain area, and as it ranks in higher quartiles, the community is using it in a more meaningful way and it should be regarded as a central journal in the disciplinary dialogue. It is clear that a 1^st quartile journal is basically in the mainstream of academic dialogue.

For the editorial and scientific team in Universitas Psychologica, entering JCR Q2 is a recognition made by the community, which we regard as very important and pleasant. This means that our work will become more demanding and we intend to adjust our review and publishing schedules. The reviewing processes will also be more demanding.

We need to move towards keeping up and improving the dialogue we maintain with the discipline worldwide.

Wilson López-López Editor