Brazilian Scientific Community Research Articles

Editorial

In terms of energy production and consumption, the modern world's needs have become more and more challenging. Electrical energy is required to power most of all current “gadgets”, as well as, large industrial equipment, and more recently, our cars, which are expected to become all-electric in the not so far future. Once electrical energy (actually any kind of energy) can not be created or destroyed, it must be converted from other forms of energy.Our economy is still dependent on fossil energy sources like coal, petroleum and gas, which may be directly used to heat our homes and keep our cars running, but also to be converted into electrical energy. The drop-back of these resources is that they are highly pollutant and a worldwide movement is trying to reduce its use. Many bio alternatives have been proposed to replace these energy sources with a certain level of success. They are renewable and may help to reduce the greenhouse gas emission problem, however, alone, they will not solve the problem. In Brazil, most of the electrical energy comes from hydroelectric plants which are clean, renewable and reliable sources, however produces some undesired environmental impacts, most of them during the power plant construction. There is also a limited amount of this kind of energy that can be exploited. In parallel, we have the clean and renewable wind and solar sources. Both extraction technologies have already reached a higher maturity level and their use has been increasing in recent years. There is a great potential for large generation plants and also for small units to be installed in domestic homes or small consumption centers. For sure, there are other energy sources that could be included in the discussion.Any emerging country, like Brazil, needs to increase its infrastructure and reach a higher level of technological development. Among many factors, energy is one of the most important ones. A key issue with the energy production is its cost, and to reduce production costs, technological advances are needed. A promising emerging country can not rely only on foreign knowledge (technology) to build its infrastructure. Moreover, sustainable development can only be achieved when technological advances are promoted by its universities and research groups in a close collaboration with the industrial sector. For every energy type above discussed, even those with a higher level of development, there is still room for new discoveries, new applications and improvements, which must be relentlessly pursued by the Brazilian scientific community. We must have a commitment to the country's future.

APRENDIZADO DE MÁQUINA APLICADO A QSAR

MACHINE LEARNING APLLIED TO QSAR. Over the years the study of the quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) has transformed from a simple regression analysis to the implementation of machine learning (ML) with multiple statistics. Today ML-based QSAR models are quite important and play a notable role in drug design and screening, property prediction, biological activity, etc. ML methods applied to QSAR build classification or regression models to describe/predict the complex relationships between the chemical structure of molecules and biological activity. Even with the increase in scientific publications addressing this topic written in Portuguese, there is still a shortage of scientific articles explaining ML techniques applied to QSAR, how to build models, the types of models, algorithms, for the Brazilian scientific community. And to fill this need, we intend to approach the subject in a simple and didactic way for students and researchers who are starting in this very promising and important area. We will describe the fully explained theory of machine learning by applying QSAR, abstracting the complexity, and well-illustrated.

Brazilian forest restoration: Success or better than nothing?

The Brazilian scientific community and non-governmental groups have been working to establish forest restoration programs, compensating for deforestation and mitigating losses from biodiversity and ecosystem services. In contrast, the previous Brazilian government moved in an opposite direction, revoking legal acts and providing scope for the rural producers to sustain non-compliance activities according to the legal regulations. Among rural producers, there is a recognized conflict between agricultural production and forest restoration programs, which results in a chaotic condition where the implementation of the environmental laws is impaired. In this context, restoration projects are often practiced without effective integrated territorial planning. This scenario challenges the success of large-scale restoration programs. The Brazilian government needs to effectively adopt sound guidelines already suggested to promote a genuine state of governance, fostering restoration programs, and moving the country's development towards an ecologically planned environment.

2nd Workshop in Microbial Molecular Biology

2nd Workshop in Microbial Molecular Biology

São Paulo earns a new scientific journal, honoring the Brazilian scientific community

São Paulo earns a new scientific journal, honoring the Brazilian scientific community

Human sporotrichosis: recommendations from the Brazilian Society of Dermatology for the clinical, diagnostic and therapeutic management

BackgroundThe increase in the zoonotic epidemic of sporotrichosis caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis, which started in the late 1990s in Rio de Janeiro and is now found in almost all Brazilian states, has been equally advancing in neighboring countries of Brazil. Changes in the clinical-epidemiological profile, advances in the laboratory diagnosis of the disease, and therapeutic difficulties have been observed throughout these almost 25 years of the epidemic, although there is no national consensus. The last international guideline dates from 2007. ObjectivesUpdate the clinical classification, diagnostic methods and recommendations on the therapeutic management of patients with sporotrichosis. MethodsTwelve experts in human sporotrichosis were selected from different Brazilian regions, and divided into three work groups: clinical, diagnosis and treatment. The bibliographic research was carried out on the EBSCOHost platform. Meetings took place via electronic mail and remote/face-to-face and hybrid settings, resulting in a questionnaire which pointed out 13 divergences, resolved based on the opinion of the majority of the participants. ResultsThe clinical classification and laboratory diagnosis were updated. Therapeutic recommendations were made for the different clinical forms. ConclusionPublication of the first national recommendation, carried out by the Brazilian Society of Dermatology, aimed at the Brazilian scientific community, especially dermatologists, infectologists, pediatricians, family medicine personnel, and laboratory professionals who work in the management of human sporotrichosis.

A Geographic Analysis of the Interdisciplinary Collaborations in the Brazilian Scientific Community

Interdisciplinary collaborations have recently attracted the attention of scholars, since they help bridging academic relationships and contribute to make scientific collaboration networks even stronger. However, previous works on this subject have mainly focused on characterizing such interdisciplinary collaborations in specific research groups or scientific communities. In this article, we start from a previous work in which we characterized the interdisciplinary collaborations within the entire Brazilian scientific community, as defined according to the upper level of the knowledge area classification scheme proposed by CNPq, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, considering the following eight major areas: Agrarian Sciences, Applied and Social Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, Exact and Earth Sciences, Health Sciences, Humanities, and Linguistics, Letters and Arts. Based on this interdisciplinary collaboration network, we conducted a geographic analysis that characterizes how these collaborations have been spread across the Brazilian geographic regions. Overall, our results show strong collaborative ties involving the triad formed by the three main Brazilian geographic regions (Southeast, South and Northeast) for all major areas. Besides, three of the eight major areas (Agrarian Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Health Sciences) show a massive participation in interdisciplinary collaborations across all regions. Despite that, geographic proximity is an important factor, since the proportion of interdisciplinary collaborations involving researchers from the same region is high. Finally, we analyze the patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration by regions and by major areas, thus showing that the Brazilian interdisciplinary network is highly connected.

Are the functional diversity terms functional? The hindrances of functional diversity understanding in the Brazilian scientific community

AbstractInterest in functional diversity has grown in recent years, indicating that knowledge on ecosystem functions gain importance. However, the incongruent use of terms may lead to misunderstandings and incomparable results. We aimed to review terms used in functional diversity among the Brazilian scientific community to identify if there is a lack of consensus in the terminology used. We applied online surveys to assess how these terms have been used by the Brazilian academics and searched for their definitions in the scientific literature. The definition of “ecological function” by Brazilian academics is like that of the niche, but we only found two articles defining such a term in the literature. Thus, it seems that “ecosystem function” is a more commonly used term outside of Brazil. The definition of “guilds” coincided with that used in the literature, although we still observed a lack of consensus in the latter. For “traits,” “functional group,” and “functional diversity” concepts, we found some discrepancy between the literature and questionnaires. These inconsistencies can be related to the use of different organizational levels for the definition of traits and to the practice of replacing species with functional groups in standard taxonomic diversity metrics, considering them as measurements of functional diversity. The adoption of cohesive terminology is crucial to ensure the comparability of scientific results in the scientific literature. However, finding a consensus in ecology represents a hard task; therefore, we encourage that, at least, researchers make clear which key concepts they adopted in their research to avoid misunderstandings.

"I am a scientist, but nobody needs to know": towards an understanding about professional self-designation among university professors in Brazil.

As in many countries, in Brazil science is conducted mostly inside universities by professors and their graduate students and post-docs. This article aims at assessing the circumstances under which university professors of a biological sciences institute of a public university are willing to adopt the term 'scientist' as a form of self-designation. Using an online questionnaire (n=21) and two focus groups (n=12) we investigated how these professionals call or describe themselves under different situations and for distinct publics. We found that most professors prefer not to call themselves a 'scientist'. They find it a natural choice not to use the term 'scientist' to designate their job in scientific research and believe that university professor is appropriate as well as it is a respectful title. However, the participants could envision possible impacts of this attitude on the general public and implications for the public perception of science and technology such as investment and science career choice. The origin of the word scientist and the history of the Brazilian scientific community are brought about to shed some light on the gathered data.

Academic mobility of doctoral students in Brazil: An analysis based on Lattes Platform

Objective. In this article, the academic mobility of Brazilian doctoral students moving from their home cities to other Brazilian cities including other countries is examined.
 Design/Methodology/Approach. The LattesDataXplorer tool was used to extract curriculum data from the Lattes Platform. 308,317 resumes were collected in May 2019, since then the data have been filtered, obtaining relevant data for the research. After extracting the data, they were enriched with the integration of other data sources, thus enabling the characterization of bibliometric networks for the analyses.
 Results/Discussion. It was possible to measure distances traveled by Brazilian doctors throughout their academic training, as well as to point out the cities, states, and countries whose doctors most meet in the academic journey and the relationships between these locations. Thus, making it possible to obtain a portrait of how the Brazilian scientific exodus occurs. In general, more than 90% of curricula have information on the academic background at each level of education. The average distance of 291 km between birth and place of formation at the graduation level is strongly influenced by outliers. Individuals choose to travel shorter distances throughout the academic training process, being the geographic location a strong influence on the migratory process for training.
 Conclusions. The United States represents the country where individuals choose to move the most. Regarding international migration, there is more preference for European countries than South American ones. When it comes to intra-regional migration, students prefer those states where the most relevant universities are located.
 Originality/Value. The article presents the results of original research focusing on the Brazilian scientific community. Distances performed by doctoral students throughout their academic trajectory are measured, as well as the main locations where they tend to move.

Lack of knowledge or neglect? The contributions of science to mitigating the risks of small Brazilian dams

The practice of building small dams has increased in Brazil and has become commonplace in the Brazilian Amazon. However, the Brazilian institutional and legal framework has not followed the progress of this practice with the establishment of adequate small dam management, which has contributed to a growing number of disasters. The inertia of the government agencies responsible for managing these structures cannot be attributed to the alleged fact that there are not enough small dams to pose significant risks to and damage the environment. Given this risk and damage scenario, we know that scientific production generates important information for stimulating management policies and improvements that minimize and/or mitigate potential risks. Thus, focusing on scientific production, this paper analysed whether the Brazilian scientific community is generating knowledge to contribute to or stimulate discussions about the management of small dams. For this purpose, we used the bibliometric method to investigate whether scientific research on Brazilian dams motivates discussions about the management of small dams, thus identifying whether the scientific community has a lack of knowledge of or has neglected small Brazilian dams. The analysis of 189 articles on Brazilian dams showed that although small dams were known, the scientific community did not produce information about them that encouraged the discussion of applicable sustainable policies. The neglect of the scientific community contributed to the inertia of competent institutional and legal bodies in managing small dams.

Fatores críticos de sucesso do ecossistema de inovação: uma meta-síntese sobre a participação de universidades

Há vários atores que participam de um ecossistema de inovação, entre eles as Universidades empreendedoras (YAGHMAIE; VANHAVERBEKE, 2019). Entretanto, os modelos de implementação da universidade empreendedora são incompletos e na literatura há poucos esforços que buscam mapear e planejar as demandas para que universidade se torne parte de um ecossistema de inovação. (DE MOURA et al., 2019). Diante deste contexto, esta pesquisa se propõe a identificar quais são os fatores críticos de sucesso para implementação da universidade empreendedora na visão da comunidade científica brasileira. A partir de uma revisão sistemática da literatura, foi conduzida uma meta-síntese qualitativa sobre universidades no contexto dos ecossistemas de inovação por meio do Literature Grounded Theory (LGT). Além do mapeamento da literatura, os resultados identificam os fatores críticos de sucesso para participação de universidades em ecossistemas de inovação. Tais fatores tem em sua origem relações de causa e efeito que puderam ser descobertas por meio da identificação de regras de associação entre os estudos analisados, o que até então, não havia sido mapeado na literatura. A partir desta análise as universidades podem identificar as demandas e planejar as ações estratégicas para criação, inserção ou adequação, bem como rever seu modelo de atuação em ecossistemas de inovação.

Open Access Publications with Article Processing Charge (APC) Payment: a Brazilian Scenario Analysis.

The expansion of open access publications has been correlated with specific government policies in many countries. The evolution in these cases is understandable within the framework of funding regulations. However, this is not the case for Brazil, where no regulation is currently in place. The unusually high percentage of open access publications in the Brazilian scientific community is analyzed here toward understanding which factors influence this growth and how similar effects may also impact other countries, particularly developing nations. We found that from 2012 to 2019 the Brazilian scientific community drifted to international open access journals. This transition is discussed in the framework of mega journals.

Half a century of studying adaptability and stability in maize and soybean in Brazil

ABSTRACT: The study of adaptability and stability underlies the cultivar recommendation process for all crops. There is a considerable number of statistical methods available for this purpose, but little is known about their actual adoption by the Brazilian scientific community. The objective of this study was to carry out a systematic review of the scientific literature on the adaptability and stability methods used in maize and soybean in Brazil from scientific articles published between 1970 and 2017 in Brazilian journals. Article searches were carried out in journals indexed through the SciELO database. The articles were classified according to the year of publication and the adaptability and stability methods used. We also evaluated the pattern of association between methods. We found 113 articles on adaptability and stability in maize and soybean, in which 21 methods were listed. The most commonly used method was the Eberhart and Russell methodology. The Cruz, Torres, and Vencovsky along with the AMMI methods were also widely used. The number of articles using most methods decreased in the current decade, except for the GGE Biplot, MHPRVG, and Centroid methods. In studies with more than one method, the methods were more likely to be used together with the Eberhart and Russell methodology. Adaptability and stability in maize and soybean have been widely studied over the last several decades in Brazil, although the number of publications on this subject has decreased over this time period.

On interdisciplinary collaborations in scientific coauthorship networks: the case of the Brazilian community

Interdisciplinary collaborations have recently drawn the attention of scholars, since bridging academic relationships contributes to make scientific coauthorship networks stronger. However, previous studies have focused on characterizing specific groups rather than on studying a complete and robust scientific community. In this article, instead of analyzing particular scenarios, we characterize these collaborations with respect to the Brazilian scientific communities defined according to the upper level of a knowledge area classification scheme. For this, we collected data from the Lattes Platform, an internationally renowned initiative from CNPq, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, that provides a repository of Brazilian researchers’ curricula vitae and research groups, all integrated into a single system. Our results show that the Brazilian coauthorship network grew and became especially interdisciplinary, with 35.2% of all collaborations being interdisciplinary and 57.6% of the researchers having participated in at least one interdisciplinary collaboration. We also investigate the intensity of these interdisciplinary collaborations across distinct communities. Finally, we explore a temporal view of the researchers’ career, thus identifying distinct collaboration patterns involving the aforementioned scientific communities.

Apropriação do Termo “Pessoas com Deficiência”

As pessoas com deficiência são historicamente discriminadas e, entre as várias ações para reduzir a discriminação, encontra-se a investigação da terminologia que as caracterizam. Pesquisas mostram que a linguagem e os conceitos que as pessoas utilizam influenciam os aspectos sociais, tal como termos pejorativos. Com base nesses aspectos, este estudo tem como objetivo analisar a apropriação e a circulação do termo “pessoa com deficiência” na comunidade científica brasileira e discutir a natureza social das terminologias e suas implicações. Para a investigação das terminologias relacionadas a quem possui o impairment, essa pesquisa analisou a apropriação do termo definido pela Convenção sobre o Direito das Pessoas com Deficiência utilizado no Brasil com base no referencial teórico dos conceitos de apropriação, de Roger Chartier (1988), tradução e negociação, de Zoia Prestes (2010), e circulação, de Pierre Bourdieu (2002). Pode-se constatar a importância da tradução e da distinção dos termos disability e impairment. A alteração na tradução do impairment como impedimento em vez de lesão resulta na concepção da deficiência como tragédia pessoal, um problema para a própria pessoa, devido ao impedimento. Da mesma forma, se a tradução de impairment for deficiência, implica não considerar os problemas físicos e de saúde que podem acontecer. Verificou-se que tanto a apropriação quanto a tradução de um termo devem estar inseridos dentro de uma cultura de origem e de destino. Embora o termo utilizado e apropriado no Brasil seja “pessoa com deficiência”, não há um consenso na literatura. Espera-se que este estudo contribua para uma reflexão crítica desse termo utilizado.

Ideologies about English as the language of science in Brazil

AbstractThis article discusses rationalizations in the Brazilian scientific community about a stretch of language that is idealized as the ‘language fit for science’. In decoupling linguistic structures from the consequential whole of language practices, metadiscourses about the scaling up of science in Brazil (that is, its movement away from a national scale and towards English‐language audiences) reduce power dynamics, institutional hierarchies, and global inequities to a flat, harmonious space and homogenous time where science supposedly unfolds. Although recent scholarship has produced empirical evidence that contemporary transcultural flows and encounters produce hybrid communicative resources and transidiomatic recombinations, these creolized idioms are largely ignored in ideologies of the language of science. While this process of extracting an idealized ‘standard’ from the realm of diversity and recombination is not new, the resulting anxieties and insecurities among those affected by pressures for going upscale are renewed, and should be critically assessed.

GO FAIR Brazil: A Challenge for Brazilian Data Science

The FAIR principles, an acronym for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, are recognised worldwide as key elements for good practice in all data management processes. To understand how the Brazilian scientific community is adhering to these principles, this article reports Brazilian adherence to the GO FAIR initiative through the creation of the GO FAIR Brazil Office and the manner in which they create their implementation networks. To contextualise this understanding, we provide a brief presentation of open data policies in Brazilian research and government, and finally, we describe a model that has been adopted for the GO FAIR Brazil implementation networks. The Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology is responsible for the GO FAIR Brazil Office, which operates in all fields of knowledge and supports thematic implementation networks. Today, GO FAIR Brazil-Health is the first active implementation network in operation, which works in all health domains, serving as a model for other fields like agriculture, nuclear energy, and digital humanities, which are in the process of adherence negotiation. This report demonstrates the strong interest and effort from the Brazilian scientific communities in implementing the FAIR principles in their research data management practices.

Science funding crisis in Brazil and COVID-19: deleterious impact on scientific output.

The Brazilian scientific community and health care workers are working hard to provide support for the political health measures to deal with this unprecedented crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paradoxically, while the society is looking forward for an immediate response of the scientific community, Brazilian scientists are facing a dramatic reduction in financial support for research and graduate programs.

Prática da Ciência Aberta: os preprints em movimento

To present a brief evolution of preprints servers, in international and national terms, and initiatives that consolidate their appropriation in the scope of scientific communication and to examine their acceptance by the Brazilian scientific community, in its technological and social components. In the international scenario, the acceptance of preprints as a model of submission seems irreversible, considering the growing number of manuscripts deposited in the preprints servers. In Brazil, the acceptance of preprints submissions by journals is still reduced. This scenario tends to change as a result of the launch of the SciELO Preprints server, by the Scientific Electronic Library Online and the EmeRI - Emerging Research Information repository, by the cooperation between the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors and the Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology, in 2020.