Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente

About Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente

Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente — Journal Profile

Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente (Development and Environment, abbreviated DMA) is a Brazilian peer-reviewed journal for interdisciplinary research at the meeting point of society and nature. It is edited by the Graduate Programme in Environment and Development (Programa de Pós-Graduação em Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento, PPGMADE) of the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) in Curitiba, Brazil, and published on the university's journal portal at revistas.ufpr.br/made. Its ISSNs are 1518-952X (print) and 2176-9109 (online). The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), charges no author fee according to its DOAJ record, and publishes under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.

This profile collects, in one place, the journal's mission and editorial rules as stated on its official About page, its review model and stated acceptance rate, its publication rhythm and open-access policy, its citation footprint as recorded by OpenAlex (attributed to that source), its indexing position, and practical guidance for authors — including the journal's unusual and important rule that purely disciplinary or purely technical papers are out of scope no matter how good they are.

At a Glance

Mission and Editorial Identity

The journal's official About page states its purpose precisely. DMA's main objectives are to publish quality articles on socio-environmental themes at local, national and international level, and to disseminate them widely across academic circuits. Anchored in an interdisciplinary perspective, its central focus is the discussion of problems that sit at the intersection between society and nature. Its socio-environmental focus seeks an innovative, multidimensional and comprehensive outlook that arises from deep dialogue between different fields of scientific knowledge.

That mission is enforced at the door. The same About page warns, in terms few journals state so bluntly, that articles of a strictly disciplinary character, or of an exclusively technical nature, should be sent to other journals and will not be considered for publication in DMA, regardless of their quality. This is the single most important fact an author can know about the journal: the gatekeeping criterion is not only rigour but interdisciplinarity. A excellent piece of pure ecology, pure economics or pure engineering with no society–nature dialogue in it is, by the journal's own rule, somebody else's paper.

The journal is the house journal of a graduate programme, PPGMADE at UFPR, and it behaves like one in the best sense: it is a venue where Brazil's interdisciplinary environmental-science community — which took institutional shape over decades, with environmental sciences consolidating as a postgraduate evaluation area in Brazil in the early 2010s — talks to itself and to the wider world. Bibliometric studies of the Brazilian development-and-environment research agenda, themselves published in DMA, show the field's thematic communities spanning public policy, the rural environment, tourism and local development, agriculture and family farming, water indicators, health, solid waste and fishing — a map that doubles as a map of the journal's own content.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Within its interdisciplinary rule, the journal's working scope — visible across its published archive and the thematic analyses of the field it serves — covers:

• Socio-environmental problems and conflicts — land, water and resource conflicts; conservation units and the communities who live in and around them; environmental justice.
• Development models and their critics — economic growth and its ecological limits, ecological-footprint and sustainability-indicator debates, degrowth and alternative development thought, the political economy of agribusiness.
• Public policy and governance — environmental policy design and evaluation, institutional arrangements, participation and social movements.
• Rural and agrarian questions — agroecology and permaculture, family agriculture, rural development, agrarian reform and food systems.
• Coastal, marine and Amazonian themes — OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's content highlights conservation, biodiversity and resource management; rural development and agriculture; coastal and marine management; and water-resource management and quality among its most frequent topics.
• Environmental education and communication — school and community environmental education, environmental journalism and the social representation of environmental questions.
• Climate, cities and health interfaces — where the analysis remains socio-environmental rather than purely technical.

Articles are published with Portuguese titles and abstracts alongside English versions on the article pages (the portal presents article records bilingually, as its published pages show), and DOIs are assigned under the prefix 10.5380/dma — an article on the limits of the Ecological Footprint, for example, is doi:10.5380/dma.v19i0.12847, from a back archive that already reached Volume 19 in 2009 and Volume 56 by the early 2020s, evidence of a long continuous run well before the Scopus-coverage window that some databases mistake for the journal's age.

Peer Review, Ethics and Editorial Process

DMA uses double-blind review: reviewers do not have access to authors' names and authors do not learn reviewers' names. The reviewer body consists only of doctorate-holding researchers from Brazilian and foreign institutions, per the journal's About page. The journal states that its acceptance rate is around 25% — a genuinely informative figure that the journal publishes about itself, and one that positions it as a demanding venue within its field despite its community-journal character.

Editorially, the journal commits publicly to publication-ethics standards: its About page declares adherence to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for journal editors, binding editors, authors, reviewers and the publisher to ethical standards of behaviour. Plagiarism control is operational, not decorative: at the first stage of evaluation the editors watch for signs of plagiarism, and where suspicion exists the manuscript is submitted to the CopySpider detection software. Authors should therefore expect integrity screening as a normal first step and should ensure that theses-derived manuscripts, translations and extended conference papers are handled with scrupulous citation of their own prior versions.

Publication Model: Continuous Flow, Full Open Access, No Fees

Since 2020 the journal has published two volumes a year in continuous flow — one covering January to June, the other July to December — with articles made available online as soon as they are ready (reviewed and typeset), rather than held for a complete issue. For authors, continuous flow removes the familiar queue in which an accepted paper waits months for an issue slot; for readers, it keeps the journal's content current within each half-year volume.

On access, the journal states that it meets the DOAJ definition of open access and adopts the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY, in its 4.0 unadapted form, per the About page, since January 2023): the full text of all content is freely and openly readable without delay, there is no embargo period, and users are not required to register to read. Its DOAJ record — verified directly against the DOAJ search API for its ISSNs at the time this profile was written — confirms the essentials: title Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente; publisher Universidade Federal do Paraná, country Brazil; licence CC BY; and no article processing charge (the DOAJ APC field records has_apc as No, pointing authors to the journal's submission guidelines). A no-fee, CC BY, university-published journal is the structurally cleanest form of open access there is, and it makes DMA straightforwardly compliant with the open-access mandates that Brazilian and international funders increasingly impose.

Metrics — Attributed to Source

Read with care: OpenAlex's corpus for this title is broad, reaching back across the journal's long run, which is why its work and citation counts (1,389 works; 6,106 citations; h-index 30) are far larger than the figures in services whose coverage window starts much later. The stored summary that some databases show — coverage "2018–2025" — describes an indexing window, not the journal's life: its own archive passes Volume 19 in 2009. The h-index of 30 in OpenAlex reflects a deep back catalogue of Portuguese-language interdisciplinary scholarship that is heavily used inside Brazil's postgraduate system, even where its per-article recent citation rates are modest. Authors evaluating DMA should therefore weigh community centrality and readership fit more heavily than any single metric, and evaluators should state which corpus any figure comes from.

Indexing and Directory Position

The journal is listed in DOAJ (verified by API, as described in the fees section). Its content is harvested into OpenAlex with a full source record under both ISSNs. SCImago/Scopus-derived summaries classify it under Environmental Science (miscellaneous) and Geography, Planning and Development. Within Brazil, the journal's standing is anchored by its home in the UFPR postgraduate system and its role as a reference venue for the interdisciplinary environmental field — the same community whose national research agenda studies keep appearing inside its pages. Authors needing a specific index (for a Qualis/CAPES evaluation, for example) should check the current classification in the official CAPES system at the time of submission, since Brazilian journal classifications are revised periodically and no third-party profile can freeze them.

How to Submit — and How to Pass the Interdisciplinarity Gate

• Frame the paper as a society–nature problem from the first paragraph. If the introduction could sit unchanged in a disciplinary journal, the paper is not yet a DMA paper.
• Bring at least two knowledge fields into genuine dialogue — the journal wants the dialogue itself to produce the insight, not a token paragraph of "social implications" bolted onto technical work.
• Prepare for double-blind review: anonymise the manuscript thoroughly, including project names, funding lines and self-citations that identify the group.
• Observe the journal's publication norms (Normas de Publicação) on the official portal for structure, length, reference style and language requirements; those norms are the governing document, not any summary.
• Expect plagiarism screening with CopySpider at the first evaluation stage, and an overall acceptance probability the journal itself puts at around 25%.
• Take comfort in the economics: no submission or publication charge per DOAJ, CC BY publication, and continuous-flow appearance once the article is ready.

One final practical note for international readers: because the journal is rooted in a Brazilian postgraduate programme, its calls, norms and correspondence run principally in Portuguese, and manuscripts should be prepared to the language requirements stated in the current Normas de Publicação on the portal. Non-Portuguese-speaking authors with a strong society-and-nature paper should write to the editorial team before submitting to confirm the language route for their manuscript, rather than assuming that a full English text will move through review unchanged.

Similar and Alternative Journals

Authors in this interdisciplinary Brazilian and Latin-American space commonly also consider: Ambiente & Sociedade (ANPPAS, São Paulo), the closest neighbouring title for environment-and-society scholarship; Sustainability in Debate (Universidade de Brasília); Revista Brasileira de Ciências Ambientais; Sociedade & Natureza (Uberlândia), for geography-facing socio-environmental work; Revista de Gestão Ambiental e Sustentabilidade; and, in English-language venues, journals of political ecology and environmental studies where the argument is framed globally. DMA's distinctive position in this set is the combination of the PPGMADE/UFPR institutional anchor, the explicit interdisciplinarity rule, no author fees and full CC BY open access.

A Long Run That Databases Understate

Newcomers meeting this journal through a metrics dashboard can easily misread its biography. Several commercial summaries list coverage beginning in 2018, and a careless reader walks away believing DMA is a young journal finding its feet. The journal's own archive disproves that reading in a few clicks: its articles carry volume numbers in the fifties by the early 2020s, its nineteenth volume appeared in 2009, and its DOI sequence under the prefix 10.5380/dma runs back through many years of continuous publication by the UFPR programme. The correct interpretation is that DMA is a mature, programme-anchored title whose presence in some international indexing corpora is more recent than its actual life — a common pattern for Latin-American university journals, and one more reason this profile reports every metric together with the corpus that produced it.

The maturity shows in the journal's self-knowledge. It publishes its own acceptance rate. It states its ethics framework and names its plagiarism tool. It announces, in writing, the class of manuscripts it will refuse on sight. Journals that have thought this carefully about their own rules tend to apply them consistently, and authors who internalise the rules before submitting — above all the interdisciplinarity rule — give themselves a materially better chance than the headline one-in-four acceptance figure suggests, because a large share of rejections at journals like this are scope rejections that the author could have predicted from the About page alone.

Reading DMA as a Researcher

For readers, DMA is one of the most efficient ways to keep up with Brazilian socio-environmental scholarship as its home community writes it: in Portuguese in the main, argued from Brazilian cases — Amazonian, coastal, agrarian, urban — but framed against international debates on development, conservation and justice. Its most characteristic papers braid a concrete territorial case with a conceptual claim: an ecological-footprint critique grounded in indicator methodology; a thematic cartography of the national environmental-sciences research agenda built from more than a thousand theses and dissertations; studies of protected areas and the popular pastorals that mediate their conflicts; agroecology and permaculture schooling projects read as development practice. A researcher entering a new Brazilian socio-environmental topic could do worse than to begin with a DMA back-issue sweep: the journal's refereeing standard (doctoral reviewers, roughly one paper in four accepted) makes its archive a filtered, citable cross-section of the field rather than an unfiltered repository.

Because every article is open access under CC BY with no embargo and no reader registration, the archive is also unusually usable in teaching: course packs, translations for classroom use and text-mining projects face no licence friction beyond attribution. That practical openness, combined with the PPGMADE anchor in one of Brazil's major federal universities, underwrites the journal's h-index of 30 in the OpenAlex corpus — a number built less on a few star papers than on a long, wide base of steadily cited community scholarship.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print 1518-952X; online 2176-9109. Both resolve to the same OpenAlex source record.

Who publishes it? The Graduate Programme in Environment and Development (PPGMADE) of the Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.

Does it charge authors? No — its DOAJ record states that it has no article processing charge.

Under what licence are articles published? Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), per the journal's About page (since January 2023) and its DOAJ record.

What is the acceptance rate? The journal itself states around 25%.

How does review work? Double-blind, with doctorate-holding reviewers from Brazilian and foreign institutions; submissions are screened for plagiarism, with CopySpider used where suspicion arises.

How often does it appear? Two volumes a year in continuous flow since 2020; articles go online as soon as they are ready.

Will a purely technical paper be considered? No. The journal states that strictly disciplinary or exclusively technical articles will not be considered, regardless of quality.

What citation footprint does it have? OpenAlex's record at checking time: 1,389 works, 6,106 citations, h-index 30.

Sources and Verification

Compiled from the journal's official About page on the UFPR portal (mission, interdisciplinarity rule, double-blind review, reviewer profile, acceptance rate, continuous-flow periodicity, CC BY policy, COPE commitment and CopySpider screening — all fetched in the foreground); the DOAJ search API record for ISSNs 1518-952X and 2176-9109 (listing verified, publisher Universidade Federal do Paraná, CC BY, no APC); the OpenAlex source record resolved through its ISSN endpoint (S2737788301: works, citations, h-index, topics); the journal's own published article pages (DOI prefix 10.5380/dma, volume history reaching Volume 19 in 2009 and Volume 56 in the early 2020s); and SCImago-derived summaries for subject classification. Where a fact could not be verified from a fetched source — for example the current CAPES/Qualis stratum — it has been left to the reader to confirm in the official system rather than asserted here.