Abstract
Brazilian scientists have been contributing to the protozoology field for more than 100 years with important discoveries of new species such asTrypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania spp. In this work, we used a Brazilian thesis database (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) covering the period from 1987-2011 to identify researchers who contributed substantially to protozoology. We selected 248 advisors by filtering to obtain researchers who supervised at least 10 theses. Based on a computational analysis of the thesis databases, we found students who were supervised by these scientists. A computational procedure was developed to determine the advisors’ scientific ancestors using the Lattes Platform. These analyses provided a list of 1,997 researchers who were inspected through Lattes CV examination and allowed the identification of the pioneers of Brazilian protozoology. Moreover, we investigated the areas in which researchers who earned PhDs in protozoology are now working. We found that 68.4% of them are still in protozoology, while 16.7% have migrated to other fields. We observed that support for protozoology by national or international agencies is clearly correlated with the increase of scientists in the field. Finally, we described the academic genealogy of Brazilian protozoology by formalising the “forest” of Brazilian scientists involved in the study of protozoa and their vectors over the past century.
Highlights
The last decade of the XIX century is considered to be the period in which experimental protozoology began (Calkins 1911)
By searching for the supervisors of actively working protozoologists, the supervisors of these supervisors, and so on, we identified the pioneers of this field in Brazil
To establish the names of actively working protozoologists to nucleate our search, we prepared a set of 60 words (Supplementary Table I) for use as keywords to screen theses (Masters or PhD) present in the local CAPES thesis database, which contained all theses completed in Brazil from 1987-2011 (Mena-Chalco & Rocha 2014)
Summary
The last decade of the XIX century is considered to be the period in which experimental protozoology began (Calkins 1911). Toxoplasmosis and giardiasis are diseases caused by protozoa, both of which represent significant public health threats (who.int). These are examples of protozoa that are of medical interest and do not include protozoa of veterinary interest or free-living protozoa, which may be important environmental markers. The study of the origin of a scientific area and the identification of the motives behind its development in new disciplines provide important contributions to the understanding of future needs. This academic genealogy allows the development of qualifying studies based on the training of new researchers. Each block represents a process and each arrow represents the information flow between processes
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