Radar Perene / Archive / science

Qualis vs. impact factor: two ways of measuring prestige that do not translate into each other

◦ Index methodology v2.2 (working papers with DOI). See the methodology.

Science

Ask two researchers whether a given journal is good and prepare for answers that do not talk to each other. One will say "it's A1"; the other, "the impact factor is low". Both are right in their own terms — and that is precisely the problem. Brazil lives with two rulers of scientific prestige that measure different things, for different audiences, and that everyday debate treats as if they were convertible. They are not.

Qualis is the Brazilian classification of journals maintained by CAPES to evaluate the output of graduate programs — a national ruler, in strata (A1 to C), designed to measure programs. Impact factor is the international average of recent citations per article in a journal — a global, continuous ruler, designed to measure visibility. A journal can rise on one and be modest on the other, because each answers a distinct question.

What each ruler actually measures

Qualis was born for an administrative purpose: CAPES needs to evaluate thousands of graduate programs, and the quality of the journals where faculty publish is one input in that account. The strata — A1 at the top, descending through A2, B1 and so on — classify journals for that end. The practical consequence is familiar to any Brazilian graduate student: publishing in a high stratum earns points for the program, the scholarship, the career progression. The ruler governs incentives inside a specific system.

The impact factor answers another question: how many times, on average, a journal's recent articles are cited. It is a measure of circulation within the international conversation — with the distortions the literature itself has documented for decades: it varies enormously across fields (a middling medical journal gets cited more than an excellent economics one), it is sensitive to a few highly cited articles, and it measures the journal, never the individual article.

Why the translation fails

The two rulers diverge because their universes diverge. Qualis weighs relevance to the Brazilian academic community — a respected national journal can occupy a high stratum with a discreet international impact factor, and that is no contradiction: it is central in one conversation and peripheral in the other. In the opposite direction, niche international journals can display respectable citation metrics and still weigh little in the evaluation of a Brazilian program in a given field.

Whoever tries to convert one ruler into the other commits a category error — like converting kilometers into degrees Celsius. The useful question is never "which ruler is the true one?" but "which incentive system governs the decision I am looking at?".

The third position: looking from outside both systems

There is a vantage point the institutional material on this subject never adopts: that of the researcher who belongs to no program at all. This house researches from that place, and from it the two rulers change weight in an instructive way. Qualis, designed to score programs, loses its immediate practical effect — there is no progression and no committee to answer to. The impact factor remains informative, but as a distant approximation of what actually matters to someone who publishes for other reasons: being read by the right community, being permanently citable, and having the work checkable by anyone.

In the house's practice, that third ruler rests on instruments independent of both classifications: the DOI, which makes each study permanently citable, the ORCID, which ties the output to a verifiable author, and scope — the question of where the conversation a study belongs to actually lives. In numbers: the six public working papers of the house series carry their own DOIs on Zenodo, starting with the Perene Risk Index study (10.5281/zenodo.21325743) — no Qualis stratum, no impact factor, and nonetheless dated, citable and checkable. Prestige rulers measure journals; they do not measure the verifiability of a study, which is the currency of whoever operates outside the graduate circuit.

None of this demotes the two rulers — they organize real systems, with real consequences for those who live inside them. The point is descriptive: rulers are instruments of systems, and reading any of them outside its system produces meaningless conclusions.

Frequently asked questions

Does Qualis count outside Brazil?

As a formal reference, no — it is an instrument of Brazilian evaluation. Foreign committees look at other metrics and, increasingly, at the content of the article itself.

Does a high impact factor guarantee an article is good?

No. The metric describes the journal's citation average, not the fate of a specific article — within the same journal, a few articles concentrate most of the citations.

Does a working paper have a Qualis stratum or an impact factor?

No — both rulers classify journals, and the working paper lives outside them. What it carries is date, authorship and, with a DOI, permanent citability; validation comes from readers and citations, not from a stratum.

Which ruler should a reader of market research look at?

Neither in isolation. To evaluate a specific study, the most informative ruler remains the study itself: public data, declared method, checkable result — the criteria this trail describes article by article.

---

Continue the trail: How Brazilian finance academia is organized: societies, meetings and journals →

House reading: the output these rulers do not measure — the dated daily record — is in the Diário.

Weighing prestige rulers against a concrete case is backstage conversation, and the house has it from inside its own experience.