The modest but growing Brazilian presence in psychiatric, psychobiological and mental health research: assessment of the 1998-2002 period

R.A Bressan,J Gerolin,J.J Mari

doi:10.1590/s0100-879x2005000500001

Abstract

The objective of the present survey was to assess the Brazilian scientific production in psychiatry, psychobiology, and mental health during the 1998-2002 period. The universities' graduate programs concentrate the vast majority of the scientific production in Brazil. We assessed the annual reports from the graduate programs to the Brazilian Ministry of Education concerning master's and doctoral theses and the articles published in journals indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). There are nine Master's and Doctoral graduate programs dedicated to research in psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, psychobiology, and mental health in the country, seven being located in southern states. During the 5-year period, from 1998 to 2002, 186 students received their doctorate degree (37/year). The programs published 637 articles in journals indexed by ISI, the majority of them in journals with an impact factor higher than 2. The research advisors' productivity varied among graduate programs, ranging from 0.6 to 2.0 articles per year in ISI-indexed journals. Despite the substantial barriers faced by the Brazilian scientific community (mainly financial and writing difficulties), Brazil's scientific mental health production is on the rise. The number of articles published in ISI-indexed journals has doubled without a significant increase in the number of graduate theses, suggesting that there was an improvement in both the quality of the scientific production and the productivity of the graduate programs. Based on these data, it is reasonable to predict a tendency to an increase in production over the next few years.

Highlights

At the beginning of the 19th century, an important change occurred in some American and European universities
The objective of the present paper is to provide an overview of Brazilian scientific production and productivity by graduate programs (GPs) dedicated to research in psychiatry, mental health and psychobiology using CAPES assessments over a five-year period (1998-2002) as a good estimate of the total Brazilian scientific production in these fields
To measure the academic efficiency of the GPs we developed indexes taking into account the number of research advisers calculated by the average master’s and doctorate research advisers during the 1998-2002 interval

Summary

Introduction

At the beginning of the 19th century, an important change occurred in some American and European universities. We have provided an overview of psychiatric and psychobiological research in Brazil based on the GPs’ production over a period of five years (1998-2002) and shown that the number of articles published in ISI journals has almost doubled during this period, with a tendency to increase even further over the years. Comparing these data with the Psychology/Psychiatry publications section of the JCR during 1999-2003 [496], there had been a greater than 400% increase in the number of publications We believe that this improvement in ISI article publications is, at least in part, a consequence of CAPES evaluation of the GPs, whose essential criterion is the relevance of intellectual production, which is determined by the quality of the scientific journals. The present data suggest that the proportion of psychiatric publications in ISI journals has tended to increase over the medium to long term

Not identified

Findings

Conclusion