science

SciELO

SciELO is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand SciELO rather than just read about it. In short: SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to increase visibility and access to scientific literature.

Key takeaways

SciELO belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect SciELO to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of SciELO from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to increase visibility and access to scientific literature. Originally established in Brazil in 1997, today there are 16 countries in the SciELO network and its journal collections: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela. SciELO was initially supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), along with the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME). SciELO provides a portal that integrates and provides access to all of the SciELO network sites. Users can search across all SciELO collections or limit the search by a single country collection, or browse by subject area, publisher, or journal title.

Database and projects By October 2015 the database contained:

1,249 journals 39,651 issues (journal numbers) 573,525 research articles 13,005,080 citations (sum of the number of items in each article's reference list) from different countries, universally accessible for free open access, in full-text format. The SciELO Project's stated aims are to "envisage the development of a common methodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific literature in electronic format". All journals are published by a special software suite which implements a scientific electronic virtual library accessed via several mechanisms, including a table of titles in alphabetic and subject list, subject and author indexes and a search engine.

History Project's launch timeline:

1997: Beginning of the development of SciELO as a FAPESP supported project in partnership with BIREME. 1998: SciELO goes live. 1998: Chile's national research agency CONICYT asks to be considered as a pilot project outside of Brazil. 1999-2000: Chile joined as a regional collection, project supported by CONICYT. 2002: the CNPq also began its support for SciELO. 2005: Argentina joined as a regional collection, project supported by CONICET 2009: South Africa joined as a regional collection, project supported by ASSAf. 2012: the SciELO Books project is launched. 2013: the SciELO Citation Index is integrated into Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge (WoS), covering about 650 journals total, 300 more than the 350 already in the WoS. 2017 SciELO announced that they were setting up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints.

Open access In 2013 the Latin American SciELO project completed 15 years of free publishing. Open access has long emphasized access to scholarly materials. However, open access can also mean access to the means of producing visible and recognized journals. This issue is particularly important in developing and emergent countries, where there are other benefits of and challenges for publishing scientific journals in and by emerging countries. SciELO also has a blog entitled "SciELO in Perspective" where scientists and researchers publish articles aimed towards broader audiences.

Technology Articles are sent to SciELO by publishers in XML or HTML+SGML, using a variety of article DTDs. The SGML DTD was used until 2013, when SciELO started to offer the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) DTD standard for XML deposites. Using to Markup XML a macro in a proprietary desktop application (Microsoft Office Word - DOCX). In the SciELO portals, received JATS-articles are converted via XSLT to HTML, and "SGML+HTML pack" articles use the HTML content (in general a handmade PDF-to-HTML conversion). This process may reveal errors that are reported back to the publisher for correction. Graphics are also converted to standard formats and sizes. The original and converted forms are archived. The converted form is moved into a relational database, along with associated files for graphics, multimedia, or other associated data. Many publishers also provide PDFs of their articles, and these are made available without change. Bibliographic citations are (SGML or XML) parsed and automatically linked to the associated articles in SciELO and resources on publishers' Web sites. Unresolvable references, such as journals or particular articles not yet available at one of these sources, are tracked in the database and automatically come "live" when the resources become available. An in-house indexing system provides search capability.

Tools Multiple tools exist to allow creation, editing and conversion for SciELO XML. They range from simple crude converters to full blown XML converters.

Conversion

To SciELO XML MS Word documents and OpenOffice (LibreOffice) documents to SciELO: Typeset: provides automated set of converters for MS-Word to SciELO XML. OxGarage: can convert documents from various XML formats meTypeset: meTypeset "is a fork of the OxGarage stack" "to convert from Microsoft Word .docx format to SciELO XML via JATS XML (using XSLT). Word to Markdown to SciELO XML: This can be done through Pandoc. This process might involve loss of information for certain complex manuscripts containing equations & tables.

From SciELO XML Take SciELO XML as input, produce a certain output format The common formats for Production phase are mentioned below:

from SciELO to HTML: (for web versions) JATS Preview Stylesheets (canonical XSLT conversion), see classical (2013) conversor. eLife Lens converts NLM XML to JSON for displaying using HTML and Javascript. Typeset Publisher Solution from SciELO to PDF: Typeset converter for SciELO XML to PDF some JATS Preview Stylesheets, XSLT + XSL-FO conversion. from SciELO to ePUB: (for mobile versions) eXtyles

Controversy

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with SciELO

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what SciELO claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to SciELO before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about SciELO ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of SciELO

In research: SciELO appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses SciELO in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: SciELO is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Academic journal online publishing platforms, Aggregation-based digital libraries, Bibliographic databases and indexes, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for SciELO outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study SciELO in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what SciELO means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain SciELO out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is SciELO in simple terms?

Why does SciELO matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study SciELO?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on SciELO.