LILACS is the most important and comprehensive index of scientific and technical literature of Latin America and the Caribbean. It includes 26 countries, 882 journals and 878,285 records, 464,451 of which are full texts.
IBECS (Índice Bibliográfico Español en Ciencias de la Salud) includes bibliographic references from scientific articles in health sciences published in Spanish journals.
You can access both databases through the Virtual Health Library (VHL) Portal.
LILACS and IBECS contents are indexed following the LILACS methodology. You can download the LILACS indexing guidelines (only in Spanish).
Additional references about LILACS can be found here.
Consistency
We used repeated articles in VHL to compare indexations and analyze consistency as follows:
- We extracted all articles with identical title and abstract.
- We manually exclude those that, despite having the same title and abstract, were unlikely to be the same article. This included: articles with abstracts too short; articles of a certain type (series) and/or with too generic title & abstracts.
This gave us 763 articles repeated at least 2 times. The set includes 374 repetition groups.
For each repeated article, we compared the indexations. For example, the following 5 articles have identical titles and abstracts and, consequently, we run an all-against-all comparison as listed in the table below.
https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/resource/pt/ibc-143700?lang=es https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/resource/pt/ibc-138461?lang=es https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/resource/pt/ibc-140304?lang=es https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/resource/pt/ibc-133858?lang=es https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/resource/pt/ibc-134090?lang=es
| 143700 | 138461 | 140304 | 133858 | 134090 | |
| 143700 | 38.9 % | 27.8 % | 31.2 % | 33.3 % | |
| 138461 | 29.4 % | 53.8 % | 46.2 % | ||
| 140304 | 20.0 % | 21.4 % | |||
| 133858 | 66.7 % | ||||
| 134090 |
The formula used is: Consistency = (Matched labels / Used labels)*100. Where Matched labels is the number of matching labels used by A & B and Used labels is the number of unique labels used.
The average max and min for all ‘repeated data’ set are as follows:
| AVG | MAX | MIN |
| 43.29409449 % | 94.1 | 5.6 |