Rogério Mugnaini

Indicadores bibliométricos da produção científica brasileira: uma análise a partir da base Pascal

As atividades de producao de indicadores quantitativos em ciencia, tecnologia e inovacao vem se fortalecendo no pais na ultima decada, com o reconhecimento da necessidade, por parte dos governos federal e estaduais e da comunidade cientifica nacional, de dispor de instrumentos para definicao de diretrizes, alocacao de investimentos e recursos, formulacao de programas e avaliacao de atividades relacionadas ao desenvolvimento cientifico e tecnologico no pais. Este trabalho insere-se dentro deste contexto, ao apresentar e analisar os indicadores bibliometricos da producao cientifica e tecnologica de pesquisadores brasileiros ao longo dos anos 90, computados a partir de uma base bibliografica internacional e multidisciplinar – a Pascal francesa. A analise dos indicadores aqui apresentados mostra que o aumento da producao cientifica brasileira foi expressivo nos ultimos 20 anos, assim como sua internacionalizacao. Ampliou-se a parceria de pesquisadores brasileiros com de outros paises, nos EUA, Europa e tambem na America do Sul. Embora ainda fortemente concentrada em Sao Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, a participacao da producao cientifica de pesquisadores de outros estados tem crescido significativamente, especialmente de Minas Gerais.

International versus national oriented Brazilian scientific journals. A scientometric analysis based on SciELO and JCR-ISI databases

SummarySciELO (Scientific Electronic Library on Line, www.scielo.bireme.br) is aprogram aimed at offering a core of Brazilian Scientific Journals in an open access mode at internet. This initiative has been followed by other Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian countries. Along with the development of the open accessed electronic library, a complementary scientometric/bibliometric database has been set up which permit to retrieve citation data of more than 40,000 articles. The robustness that this database has now achieved allows one to make important studies which were not possible before, using only the international Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database.

Comparison of scientists of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on the basis of the h-index

A new scientometric indicator, the h-index, has been recently proposed (Hirsch JE. Proc Natl Acad Sci 2005; 102: 16569-16572). The index avoids some shortcomings of the calculation of the total number of citations as a parameter to evaluate scientific performance. Although it has become known only recently, it has had widespread acceptance. A comparison of the average h-index of members of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (BAS) and of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (NAS-USA) was carried out for 10 different areas of science. Although, as expected, the comparison was unfavorable to the members of the BAS, the imbalance was distinct in different areas. Since these two academies represent, to a significant extent, the science of top quality produced in each country, the comparison allows the identification of the areas in Brazil that are closer to the international stakeholders of scientific excellence. The areas of Physics and Mathematics stand out in this context. The heterogeneity of the h-index in the different areas, estimated by the median dispersion of the index, is significantly higher in the BAS than in the NAS-USA. No elements have been collected in the present study to provide an explanation for this fact.

A new indicator for international visibility: exploring Brazilian scientific community

Brazilian science has increased fast during the last decades. An example is the increasing in the country’s share in the world’s scientific publication within the main international databases. But what is the actual weight of international publications to the whole Brazilian productivity? In order to respond this question, we have elaborated a new indicator, the International Publication Ratio (IPR). The data source was Lattes Database, a database organized by one of the main Brazilian S&T funding agency, which encompasses publication data from 1997 to 2004 of about 51,000 Brazilian researchers. Influences of distinct parameters, such as sectors, fields, career age and gender, are analyzed. We hope the data presented may help S&T managers and other S&T interests to better understand the complexity under the concept scientific productivity, especially in peripheral countries in science, such as Brazil.

Influências metodológicas na mensuração de impacto: o caso das Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz e sua "qualificação"

Diversos indices de citacao tem sido utilizados para avaliacao de producao cientifica. A comparacao entre os resultados da metodologia empregada para calculo de indicadores, nos relatorios de citacao da base SciELO e Journal Citation Reports (ISI-Thomson Scientific) possibilitou avaliar as implicacoes associadas a politica cientifica (Qualis), em alguns de seus criterios especificos. Considerou-se um periodo de 10 anos, tendo em conta dois indicadores bibliometricos (total de citacoes no ano e fator de impacto) da revista Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, que e indexada em ambos os indices. A correcao dos indicadores associados a revista mostrou que as diferencas proporcionadas pelos indices de citacao foram mais expressivas no ano de 2001, tendo diminuido nos ultimos anos. Esta diminuicao confere confiabilidade a ambas as bases, validando seus sistemas para producao de indicadores de producao cientifica.

Comunicação científica no Brasil (1998-2012): indexação, crescimento, fluxo e dispersão

A producao cientifica brasileira vem demonstrando ascensao no cenario mundial, o que pode decorrer da internacionalizacao da ciencia nacional e/ou das revistas nacionais. Nesse contexto, este estudo reuniu a producao cientifica brasileira das bases Web of Science e Scientific Electronic Library Online entre 1998 e 2012, com o fim de analisar como a internacionalizacao tem influenciado a performance do pais. Com base em Zonas de Bradford da producao das diversas areas, buscou avaliar o aumento do numero de revistas em cada uma das zonas, assim como a proporcao de artigos publicados em revistas nacionais, ao longo de cinco trienios. Observou-se que o numero de revistas indexadas exclusivamente na Scientific Electronic Library Online cresceu no periodo, com excecao do trienio 4, quando aproximadamente 60% da producao nacional foi publicada em revistas estrangeiras ( Web of Science ). Notou-se que o aumento mais generalizado do numero de revistas das areas deu-se primeiramente na zona 3 (trienio 2004-2006), depois na zona 2 (trienio 2007-2009) e finalmente na zona 1 (trienio 2010-2012). Ja o percentual da producao em revistas nacionais diferenciou tres grupos de areas: ciencias sociais e humanas, onde as zonas 1 e 2 sao exclusivas de revistas nacionais, e a zona 3 vem dando lugar a publicacoes estrangeiras; Fisica, Ciencia do Espaco e Imunologia, cuja producao e exclusivamente internacional; e as demais areas, de ciencias exatas e da terra, saude e biologicas, que vem aumentando o percentual nas zonas 1 e 2, permanecendo a zona 3 direcionada a publicacoes internacionais. Palavras-chave : Avaliacao de pesquisa. Brasil. Producao cientifica. Revistas cientificas nacionais. Zonas de Bradford.

Analysis of an advisor-advisee relationship: an exploratory study of the area of exact and Earth sciences in Brazil.

Scientific collaboration has been studied by researchers for decades. Several approaches have been adopted to address the question of how collaboration has evolved in terms of publication output, numbers of coauthors, and multidisciplinary trends. One particular type of collaboration that has received very little attention concerns advisor and advisee relationships. In this paper, we examine this relationship for the researchers who are involved in the area of Exact and Earth Sciences in Brazil and its eight subareas. These pairs are registered in the Lattes Platform that manages the individual curricula vitae of Brazilian researchers. The individual features of these academic researchers and their coauthoring relationships were investigated. We have found evidence that there exists positive correlation between time of advisor–advisee relationship with the advisee’s productivity. Additionally, there has been a gradual decline in advisor–advisee coauthoring over a number of years as measured by the Kulczynski index, which could be interpreted as decline of the dependence.

A new model to identify the productivity of theses in terms of articles using co-word analysis

A thesis defense should be considered as not the end but the starting point for scientific communication flow. How many articles truly extend doctoral research? This article proposes a new model to automatically identify the productivity of theses in terms of article publications. We evaluate the use of the co-word analysis technique to establish relationships among 401 doctoral theses and 2,211 articles journal articles published by students in a graduate program at a Brazilian National Nuclear Research Institution (IPEN-CNEN/SP).To identify the relationship between a thesis and an article published by the same author, we used co-descriptor pairs from a controlled vocabulary. To validate the proposed model, a survey was applied to a random sample of theses authors (n = 128, response rate of 79%), thus establishing a minimum threshold of three coincident co-descriptors to identify the relationship between theses and articles. The agreement level between an author′s opinion and the automatic method was 86.9%, with a sampling error of 7.36%, which indicates an acceptable level of accuracy. Differences between the related or nonrelated distributions of articles were also demonstrated, as was a reduction in the median lag time to publication and the supervisor′s influence on student productivity.

The Impact Factor: its popularity and impacts, and the need to preserve the scientific knowledge generation process

The evaluation process of scientific production based on objective criteria, at the national level, despite its relatively recent deployment in Brazil (1998), and due to its magnitude, was enough to widely disseminate the use of the Impact Factor, making its use very popular, unfortunately. Now, its broadly mentioned limitations should be made popular as well(1). This indicator, initially proposed in the 1950s(2), is a result of prior efforts of other researchers(3), whose intention, when presenting the bibliographical references of an issue of The Journal of the American Chemical Society, was to identify the most relevant chemistry journals for the library of a small college. This initiative of journal selection had worldwide implications considering that, in the 1970s, the Science Citation Index (SCI)(a) started to publish its Journal Citation Reports, widely known by its acronym JCR. This report offered the possibility to reproduce the study conducted in 1927(3), as it ranked the journals cited by (or that cite) any of the journals indexed by the SCI. Besides this possibility, the Impact Factor of each journal was presented, as well as the Immediacy Index and Cited/Citing Half-Life, which are currently maintained. Other indicators have been presented in the report, but without the same popularity. Using the Impact Factor in evaluations means using an analysis that is limited to citations of journals indexed in the Web of Science (a web interface that accesses the SCI and its complementary databases in social sciences, arts and humanities). In addition, it restricts citations of recent articles, as it only considers the first and second years after a study is published. That is, if a journal has articles from a certain year cited one or two years later, the impact of this journal is not taken into account. Is that the way we handle the literature of our field, determining such a short validity period? Then, if that is the case, should the expensive subscriptions of journals be paid for two years only? Another aspect of concern: in terms of Brazilian science, citations of journals not indexed in the Web of Science will not be considered – when observing the percentage of Brazilian journals cited in articles of Brazilian authors, it is possible to estimate how much information is lost. In addition, an even greater restriction occurs when citations of other types of document are ignored – such as books, conference articles, and dissertations. Should we stop requiring the proposal and defense of a dissertation to obtain the PhD degree? And how about doctorate program students, do they no longer need to build the state of the art regarding their theme of study? EDITORIAL DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0080-623420160000600002

ANÁLISE COMPARATIVA DA PRODUTIVIDADE DOS PARES ORIENTADOR-ORIENTADO EM CIÊNCIA DA COMPUTAÇÃO

The increasing involvement of graduate students in scientific communication has been the subject of studies in many countries that have been discussing the role of doctoral studies in the research career. In this article we are interested on the study of the academic relationship between the advisor and the advisee for a group of PhD pairs in the Computer Science area, with curricula registered in the Lattes Platform. We analyze the main characteristics of the group and their coauthor relationships. In terms of co-authorship: (i) we observe that the duration that is established between advisor and advisee can extrapolate the formal period of supervision, and (ii) we show that the duration of the collaboration is correlated with both the number of articles published by the advisee and the ones published by the advisor. In this work we also present the advisee profile for researchers that worked in some of the graduate courses in Computer Science in Brazil in the triennium 2007-2009.