Revista Katálysis

About Revista Katálysis

Revista Katálysis — Journal Profile

Revista Katálysis is a Brazilian scientific journal of social work and the social sciences, published in Florianópolis by the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), through its Graduate Programme in Social Work and its undergraduate Social Work course. Founded in 1997 and published without interruption since then, it is one of Brazil's reference journals for social work scholarship: the university records it as classified A1 by Qualis/CAPES, the highest band in Brazil's national journal classification for graduate education, and it is indexed in SciELO, where it has been present since 2006, and listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Its identifiers are stable and well documented — print ISSN 1414-4980 and online ISSN 1982-0259, with 1414-4980 as the linking ISSN — and both numbers appear on this directory record. The journal publishes original research articles on social work and related themes across the human and social sciences and the applied social sciences, in Portuguese, Spanish and English, with a thematic focus in each issue and a commitment, stated by its editors, to being maintained entirely in the public sphere, free of charge to read and free of charge to publish in.

At a glance

Several features distinguish Katálysis from a typical disciplinary journal. It is edited by a graduate programme and an undergraduate course together, so teaching, research, outreach and professional practice — the four activities its mission names — are all inside its remit. Each edition is centred on a thematic unit chosen for its importance in the contemporary social context, while also leaving space for free themes, so the archive reads as a sequence of collective interventions in Brazilian social debate as well as a collection of individual articles. And it is a product of the public university, a point its editors treat as part of its identity: publicly maintained, openly accessible and rigorously periodic, which in Brazilian social work — a profession with a strong ethical-political project and a large public-sector workforce — gives the journal a particular authority.

History and institutional home

UFSC's library cataloguing for the journal records its beginning precisely: number 1 in June 1997, published in Florianópolis by the university's press, at first linked to the Department of Social Work and, from 2004, to the Graduate Programme in Social Work and the undergraduate Social Work course, which remain its editors today. It was semiannual in that early cataloguing, with abstracts in Portuguese and English. From 2006 it became present in SciELO, the Scientific Electronic Library Online, and from 2008 it has also been hosted on the UFSC journals portal. The journal's own about page confirms the continuity in a single sentence: created in 1997 and published uninterruptedly since then. Nearly three decades of uninterrupted publication is, by itself, a significant fact about a Latin American social-science journal, many of which appear irregularly or cease; Katálysis has instead moved through Brazil's successive evaluation regimes while keeping its rhythm, reaching volume 26 in 2023 and continuing beyond it, with issues organised in four-month periods in recent volumes.

The name itself — Katálysis, a Greek-derived word evoking dissolution and breaking down — signals the journal's critical orientation. Its pages have consistently hosted work written from critical social theory: analyses of the social question, of inequality, of the State and social policy, and of the ethical-political project of Brazilian social work. The journal is cited, its editors note, across the sub-areas of the social sciences, mainly on themes involving social policies, human rights, citizenship, the social question and social inequality. Readers who open an issue expecting neutral technical reporting on welfare administration will instead find argument — researched, referenced and peer-reviewed, but argument — about the structures that produce the problems social workers meet in practice.

Mission, focus and scope

The journal's stated mission is to publish scientific production relevant to social work, covering themes from related areas, through the public university. It aims to promote and disseminate current and significant production from teaching, research, outreach and professional practice in social work, addressing themes of the human and social sciences, the applied social sciences and their relations with other fields of knowledge, through original scientific articles resulting from research. Its editors describe its differential as its entirely public maintenance, its open access and its indexing in the principal existing databases, and argue that rigour in periodicity and in the quality of its articles makes it a reference for the publication of scientific knowledge and sustains its relevance and singularity in the applied social sciences.

In practical terms, the journal commissions and accepts work issue by issue around a theme. A call for volume 26, number 1 (2023), for example, gathered articles on health crisis, territories and poverty, unfolding into studies of the capitalist offensive and inequality in facing the pandemic, counter-reforms and the dismantling of social protection, territorial inequality and the right to the city, impoverishment and its expressions in territories, denialism and hygienist policies and their effects on people living on the street, LGBTQIAP+ people, quilombola and Indigenous communities, menstrual poverty, and the impacts of the pandemic on the right to education; the following number took up crisis of capital, human rights and class struggle. Those calls show the journal's method at work: a contemporary social problem is named, and research is invited that connects empirical study to the larger structures — work, State, rights and class — that Brazilian social work theory treats as inseparable from practice. Free-theme articles also appear, so a strong manuscript need not wait for a matching call, but authors should check the journal's announcements, because thematic deadlines are fixed long in advance of publication.

Scope in depth: what the journal publishes, topic by topic

The journal's scope can be read from its mission, its indexing keywords and the themes its issues actually pursue. The areas below organise that scope for readers and prospective authors.

Social work as a profession and a field of knowledge

Research on social work itself: its history in Brazil, its ethical-political project, its formation and curricula, its professional practice and its place in the division of labour. Studies of how knowledge is produced in Brazilian social work, and of the profession's confrontation with conservatism, are characteristic of the journal and appear in its pages as full research articles, not only as editorials.

Social policy and social protection

Analysis of social policies — their design, financing, reform and dismantling — and of the protection systems through which rights are, or are not, delivered. Work on Brazil's unified social assistance and health systems, on conditional and universal programmes, and on counter-reforms that reduce protection is central to the journal.

The social question and social inequality

The Brazilian social-work tradition treats the social question — the inequalities generated by capitalist development — as its founding object. Articles in this area analyse poverty, impoverishment and inequality in their territorial, racial, gender and generational expressions, and connect empirical findings to that theoretical frame.

Human rights and citizenship

Studies of rights in practice: access to rights, violations, the institutions that guarantee or deny them, and the expansion or contraction of citizenship. Human rights is one of the journal's recorded keywords and a recurring issue theme, including in its treatment of class struggle and rights under crisis.

Democracy, the State and public management

Work on the State, on participation and social control through policy councils, on public management and intersectoral action, and on the quality of democracy. Analyses of women's political representation in public-policy councils and of municipal management councils published in the journal exemplify this area.

Work and the world of labour

Research on labour, precariousness, unemployment and the transformations of work, and on interdisciplinarity and professional practice at the interface with the world of work. Work is one of the standing thematic axes named in the journal's calls, reflecting its place in critical social theory.

Health and public health

Social work in health settings, primary care, health crises and the social dimensions of illness and care. The journal's pandemic-era issues, including studies of social workers in primary care during the Covid-19 health crisis, show how clinical and community settings are analysed through social policy and rights, not only through biomedicine.

Gender, race, generations and sexuality

Intersectional and structural analyses of how gender, race and ethnicity, generation and sexuality shape social experience and professional intervention. A widely cited article in the journal on social work, gender, race and ethnicity, generations and sexuality illustrates the area, and gender and feminism in the history of the profession is a further recurring subject.

Education and graduate studies

Research on education as a social right and on the formation of social workers and researchers, including the dilemmas of graduate studies in Brazil and the construction of courses and curricula. As a journal edited by a graduate programme, Katálysis treats debate about graduate education as part of its own house business.

Territory, city and populations in vulnerable situations

Studies of territories and the right to the city, of people living on the street, of Indigenous and quilombola communities, and of other populations whose rights are most exposed in crises. This area gained prominence in the journal's post-pandemic thematic issues and connects social work research to urban and community practice.

Editorial practice, open science and ethics

The journal states that it is an arbitrated journal using double-blind peer review, indexed and in national and international circulation, and its about page sets out an unusually detailed alignment with open science. In line with SciELO's open-science guidance, it adopts free access, a code of good practice for editors and the use of social networks to disseminate published work; it requires the precise role of each author in multi-authored articles to be indicated; it encourages sharing of analysis datasets, instruments, statistical scripts, interview guides and additional materials in open online repositories such as Zenodo, Figshare or the Open Science Framework when they cannot be published within the article itself, with that availability indicated and referenced in the manuscript; and it offers authors and reviewers options to open the peer-review process, with or without identification, including the possibility that the reviews supporting a publication decision are themselves published, in edited form, with section editors credited and reviewers able to validate their activity through reviewer-recognition services.

Its ethics framework is equally explicit. The about page states that the journal maintains publication-ethics standards and takes all possible measures in the publication process, that the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) should orient the conduct of all parties, and it lists the instruments it draws on, among them the Brazilian CNPq basic guidelines for integrity in scientific activity, the rules for research with human subjects in the human and social sciences, the transparency and best-practice principles for scholarly publishing, and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). For authors, the practical meaning is that ethical approval, consent and data-availability questions should be settled before submission and documented in the manuscript, in the form the journal's conformity-with-open-science documentation requires.

Access, licensing, indexing and metrics — what is and is not claimed

The Directory of Open Access Journals records no publication fees for this journal, a CC BY licence, open access from 2006, plagiarism checking, manuscripts accepted in Spanish, Portuguese and English, and an average of thirteen weeks from submission to publication. Its subject classification there places it in social pathology, social and public welfare and criminology within the social sciences — a Library of Congress shelving that should not be mistaken for the journal's self-description, which is social work and the applied social sciences. Its presence in SciELO Brazil, with a full archive and DOIs in the 10.1590 pattern that SciELO assigns, is the strongest single discovery route for its articles, and its UFSC portal site carries the current editorial information, calls and announcements.

This profile does not state a Journal Impact Factor, CiteScore or SCImago quartile for Katálysis, because none was verified from an official source during preparation: the journal's own pages foreground its A1 Qualis/CAPES classification, which is the ranking that governs its standing inside Brazilian graduate education, and that classification is the metric its editors themselves cite. Readers who encounter impact figures for this journal on commercial ranking sites should check the year, the database and the method behind the figure before using it, and should treat the A1 classification, the SciELO presence, the uninterrupted run since 1997 and the double-blind process described above as the verified quality signals for this title.

For authors: preparing a submission that fits

A fitting manuscript is an original research article — the journal specifies original scientific articles resulting from research — that addresses social work or a related theme in the human, social or applied social sciences and that situates its findings in the debates the journal sustains: social policy, rights, the social question, work, health and inequality. Authors should write for a readership that expects theoretical grounding as well as empirical material; purely descriptive service reports without analysis are a poor match for a journal whose articles are framed by critical social theory. Manuscripts may be written in Portuguese, Spanish or English. Because editions are organised around thematic units with calls issued well in advance, the first step is to read the current announcements on the UFSC portal and, if submitting to a theme, to meet its stated receiving window; free-theme submission routes and formatting requirements are given in the journal's current author guidelines on the same site, which is the authoritative source and should be followed over any summary, including this one.

Frequently asked questions

Is Revista Katálysis a journal about catalysis or chemistry?

No. Despite the similarity of the name to the English word catalysis, this is a Brazilian social work and social sciences journal from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, with print ISSN 1414-4980 and online ISSN 1982-0259. Chemistry journals of a similar name are entirely different publications, with different ISSNs and publishers.

How highly is it ranked in Brazil?

Its official pages state that it is classified A1 by Qualis/CAPES, the highest band in the Brazilian national classification used in graduate education evaluation. That is the ranking its editors cite; this profile does not attribute a commercial impact factor to it.

Does it charge to publish or to read?

No. The Directory of Open Access Journals records no publication fees, and the journal is open access, present in SciELO since 2006 under a CC BY licence as recorded there.

In which languages does it publish?

Portuguese, Spanish and English. The Directory of Open Access Journals records manuscripts accepted in all three, and its archive contains articles in Portuguese with versions and abstracts supporting readers in the other languages.

How long has it been published?

Since 1997, without interruption, according to its official about page. It was linked to UFSC's Department of Social Work until 2003 and, from 2004, to the Graduate Programme in Social Work and the undergraduate Social Work course, its current editors.

Profile conclusion

Revista Katálysis is a durable institution of Brazilian social work scholarship: publicly maintained at a federal university, A1-classified, SciELO-indexed, double-blind reviewed, free to read and free to publish in, and published without interruption since 1997. Its thematic issues turn each edition into a collective research intervention — on health crisis and poverty, on capital, rights and class, on policy, work and inequality — while its open-science and ethics policies, set out in unusual detail, place it firmly inside SciELO's current standards. For researchers in social work and the applied social sciences, in Brazil and across the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world, it is both an archive of how Brazilian social work has thought about the social question for nearly thirty years and an active, verified venue for new research in that tradition.

Sources and verification

• Official journal site, UFSC journals portal — About page (periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/katalysis/about): history from 1997, editors, A1 Qualis/CAPES, double-blind review, open-science and ethics policies, focus and scope
• Official journal announcements, UFSC portal (periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/katalysis/announcement): thematic calls, volume 26 (2023)
• Directory of Open Access Journals listing for Revista Katálysis (online ISSN 1982-0259): publisher, languages, CC BY, no fees, 13-week average
• ISSN Portal record, ISSN 1982-0259 (ISSN-L 1414-4980): publisher, Florianópolis, semiannual origin, 1997–
• UFSC library cataloguing in the journal's front matter: number 1, June 1997; SciELO presence from 2006; print ISSN 1414-4980, online ISSN 1982-0259
• SciELO Brazil journal site for Revista Katálysis (scielo.br/j/rk)
• JournalsWorld live record for this post, recording ISSNs 1414-4980 and 1982-0259

Verified for this profile in October 2026 against the official journal or publisher pages and the directory records listed above. Where an official source did not publish a figure, this profile states that the figure is not publicly disclosed rather than estimating it.