The creation of the Capes Portal for periodicals was a milestone for the Brazilian scientific community. The Portal allowed researchers to have access to the database and to thousands of scientific journals worldwide. To verify the importance of this milestone, scientific papers published by 200 researchers from graduate courses in the Biological and Health Sciences at the University of Brasilia were evaluated with respect to: i) the number of references; ii) if the references were written as international or local papers; and iii) if those articles were of quality, as determined by Capes. The evaluated papers were from 1995 to 2005, five years (1995-1999) before of creation of Portal (2000), and five years afterwards (2001-2005). This investigation concluded that with the creation ofthe Capes Portalfor periodicals,the researchers increased the number of references and the number of international citations in their articles and also augmented the quality of the publications mentioned in their texts.