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Dr. María de la Luz Mora Gil, the director of BIOREN-UFRO, is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, which increased citations from 1,440 in 2018 to 3,256 in 2020. |
Web of Science (WOS) informed that the Journal of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition (JSSPN), which is edited by the Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) and the Chilean Society of Soil Science, reached an Impact Factor of 3.872, an indicator that positions it in the group of top scientific journals with the highest impact in the world and in the field of plant sciences, soil sciences and environmental sciences. This is a milestone for UFRO and a great achievement for Chile. The Journal Citation Report (JCR) of WOS, provided by Clarivate Analytics, allows obtaining comparable statistical data of citations, including the Impact Factor, which systematically and objectively determines the relative importance of the world's leading scientific journals according to their respective thematic categories. In its fields of expertise, JSSPN is positioned in first quartile (Q1) in Plant Sciences and in second quartile (Q2) in Soil Science and Environmental Sciences. At the national level, JSSPN maintains the deserved and meritorious second place among all journals published in Chile, and first in the field of Soil and Environmental Sciences. It is remarkable that the two best-positioned Chilean journals significantly increased their impact factor during the pandemic. THE JOURNAL AND ITS HISTORY The journal was created as an initiative for scientific dissemination in Chile, impulsed by the outstanding academic and researcher Dr. Achim Ellies of the university Universidad Austral de Chile. When he died in 2005, the Chilean Society of Soil Science entrusted Dr. María de la Luz Mora Gil, a highly estimated academic and researcher of UFRO, with the responsibility of directing and promoting this scientific project. In 2008, the internationalization process for the journal began by being indexed in Thomson Reuters (currently WOS Clarivate), thanks to its alliance with the SciELO publishing house, the support of national and international collaborators and the different projects funded by the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID). In 2018, an agreement was signed with the global publisher Springer Nature, so that the journal started to be published by this huge and renowned international publisher since 2019. This was a fundamental and strategic step, since it gives the managing entities, in this case the Chilean Society of Soil Science and the Universidad de La Frontera, a greater visualization and international reputation. Consequently, the number of citations more than doubled from 1,440 citations in 2018 to 3,256 citations in 2020. After joining Springer, the Impact Factor of the journal JSSPN fluctuated around 2 points without major variations for a couple of years. Now, after a long period of hard work carried out by the editors and reviewers, and a long-term strategy, the journal has an Impact Factor of 3.872. This figure is highly relevant, since it places JSSPN in the first quartile (Q1) in the field of Plant Sciences, a segment reserved for the most important scientific journals in the world. This converts JSSPN into an important reference for researchers and scientists from all over the world. Dr. María de la Luz Mora Gil, the editor-in-chief, comments that “we are very proud to see how the journal has grown over the last ten years, especially considering that the management is based at the Universidad de La Frontera, with outstanding and very hard working collaborators who dedicated many hours to this project. Some of them are Dr. Alex Seguel, Dr. Fernanda Cid and an entire editorial team led by Dr. Patricio Barra. We are very happy, because we are convinced that this is a tremendous achievement for the Universidad de la Frontera and for the entire country. This has been possible thanks to the hard work of many people – a lot of them graduates of the Doctorate in Natural Resource Sciences of UFRO – who have made available all their skills and knowledge in order to reach our goals”. One of the strategies to achieve a constant growth of the journal is to have a team of internationally recognized collaborators in the Editorial Committee, such as Dr. Nanthi Bolan (University of Newcastle, Australia), Dr. Leo Condron (Lincoln University, New Zealand), Dr. Petra Marschner (University of Adelaide, Australia), Dr. Miroslav Nikolic (University of Belgrade, Serbia), Dr. Maria A Rao (Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy), Dr. Alan Richardson (CSIRO Plant Industry, Australia) and Dr. Cornelia Rumpel (French National Centre for Scientific Research, France). “These internationally renowned Associate Editors are actively participating in the reviewing and editing process of our journal,” explains Dr. Mora. Regarding the quality of the contents, Dr. María de la Luz Mora Gil points out that “we are very strict when it comes to the selection of articles for our journal, because we are looking for novel and excellent papers of quality, with high impact. Of about 1500 papers we receive over the year, we publish about 20%. That requires meticulous work, which is carried out by our team of collaborators and editors”. According to Dr. María de la Luz Mora Gil, this remarkable achievement motivates the team to keep working and developing their strategies. “In a competitive world like ours, it is not easy to maintain our standards – that is our main task, and the second one is to enter the first quartile (Q1) in the fields of Soil Science and Environmental Sciences. Actually, we are already working on that, for example through Special Editions,” she concludes. Written by: Andrea Poblete Pacheco |
