Brazilian Science Research Articles

Secretary’s Report, 2015

Secretary’s Report, 2015

Theater in Brazilian science museums and centers

This qualitative research, based on a descriptive and exploratory study, examines how theater is used as a science communication strategy by Brazilian science museums and centers. Data was collected through a survey emailed to 24 Brazilian institutions identified as science museums and centers. Content analysis was performed, using cross-sectional thematic analysis. It was found that respondents' activities could be classified as approaching theater as an educational support.

Intellectual structure in stem cell research: exploring Brazilian scientific articles from 2001 to 2010

With the advent of co-citation techniques in the 1960's, studies on citation shifted from simple quantifications of the number of citations per document to more complex analyses focusing on the relationship between citations. The present study seeks to map the scientific and cognitive structure of Brazilian stem cell publications. Brazilian publications from 2001 to 2010 were retrieved from the Web of Science database, and data on journal co-citations were processed with the help of VOSViewer software. The results indicated that Brazilian stem cell publications are characterised by a strong emphasis on co-cited journals in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology, cell biology and haematology. Such characteristics suggest that Brazilian stem cell research is oriented both towards the treatment of a variety of human diseases and injuries caused by accidents (research with stem cells) as well as the understanding of stem cells' mechanisms of division, differentiation and self-renewal (research on stem cells), the most promising facet of stem cells. The progress in Brazilian stem cell research likely results from a combination of a federal law established in the 2000's, which regulates stem cell use and research, and the growth of Brazilian science.

Funding Policy Research Under 'Distasteful Regimes': The Ford Foundation and the Social Sciences at the University of Brasslia

The Ford Foundation’s initial effort to assist in the development of the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. Given the Foundation’s expressed goal of fostering research that was of potential relevance for public policy, the Brazilian political context posed a difficult dilemma. The issue came to the forefront amid discussions over a proposal for the creation of a Master’s Program in Economics at the University of Brasilia (UnB). Although UnB’s modern institutional structure was ideally suited for the Foundation’s purposes, the university had been subject to repeated military interventions in late 1960’s. Moreover, its geographical closeness to the seat of Brazilian political power arose concerns that it could become an instrument in the hands of the military government. Using evidence from the Ford Foundation archives, the paper attempts to illuminate the institutional context surrounding the development of academic economics in Brazil in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in its relations to the deeper social and political currents in effect at the time.

The role of journals in building up communities: the experience of Ciência em Tela

Ciencia em Tela is an open access Brazilian science teacher education online journal that has been published twice a year since 2008 and which encourages the participation of professionals with different backgrounds and the submission of a variety of textual genres, besides research papers. Another feature is that the journal includes practicing schoolteachers not only as authors but also as reviewers, which not only provides those who submit contributions to the journal with an early feedback from their target audience but also helps empower schoolteachers by placing them in a discursive situation in which they are producers, as opposed to consumers, of discourses about science education. In this paper we describe the background to and main aspects of the journal’s innovative editorial policy, which seeks to bridge gaps between communities and institutions linked to science education, as well as to discuss the challenges that arise from it, in particular, issues concerning internationalisation and funding, as well as the role of journals in times of colonisation and commodification of knowledge and of discourses.

A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Brazilian Science from the Perspective of Researchers' Career Trajectories.

The growth of Brazilian scientific production in recent years is remarkable, which motivates an investigation on the factors, inside and outside the country, that helped shape this wealthy research environment. This article provides a thorough analysis of the education of researchers that constitute the main Brazilian research groups, using data on about 6,000 researchers involved in the country’s National Institutes of Science and Technology (INCT) initiative. Data on the steps taken by each researcher in her education, from the bachelor’s degree to doctorate, including a possible postdoctoral experience, and employment, are extracted from an official curriculum vitae repository. The location and the time at which each career step occurred define spatiotemporal career trajectories. We then analyze such trajectories considering additional data, including the area of knowledge of the INCTs to which each researcher is associated. We found an increasing prevalence of Brazilian institutions in the education of Brazilian scientists, as the number of doctorates earned abroad is decreasing over time. Postdoctoral stages, on the other hand, often take place in Europe or in the United States. Taking an international postdoctoral position after a full education in Brazil suggests a drive towards seeking higher-level exchange and cooperation with foreign groups in a more advanced career stage. Results also show that Brazilian researchers tend to seek employment in regions that are close to the institutions at which they received their bachelor’s degrees, suggesting low mobility within the country. This study can be instrumental in defining public policies for correcting distortions, and can help other developing countries that aim to improve their national science systems.

Cor, intelectuais e nação na sociologia de Guerreiro Ramos

Resumo:Este artigo analisa os estudos sociológicos de Guerreiro Ramos sobre as relações raciais no Brasil durante seu engajamento no Teatro Experimental do Negro e por ocasião de suas críticas aos estudos da Unesco, sobretudo nos debates com os sociólogos Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto e Roger Bastide, quando já se tornara um intelectual vinculado ao Instituto Brasileiro de Estudos Sociais e Políticos (IBESP), futuro ISEB. A produção sociológica de Guerreiro Ramos não apenas apresenta o ambiente intelectual, os padrões de trabalho científico no domínio da sociologia, mas também revela os impactos dessas investigações na prática das ciências sociais no Brasil. As controvérsias denotam o desenvolvimento da institucionalização das Ciências Sociais marcado por disputas quanto aos rumos que este processo deveria tomar em um país em acelerado processo de mudança social.

O Brazilian Journal of Geology atingiu nível internacional no sistema QUALIS

QUALIS system of Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES) is the most powerful and efficient tool for classification and stratification of national and international journals used for dissemination of scientific articles, thus being adopted as the evaluation basis of various Brazilian science research agencies. Quality of the scientific production from graduate programs in the country is indirectly assessed throughout classification analysis of scientific journals. The criteria governing this stratification are defined from international databases, such as the impact factor ISI/JCR and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). Since many Brazilian journals are not indexed in these bases, each publishing vehicle is individually classified by criteria like publication frequency and editorial policy adopted. This evaluation mechanism is leading many publishers to strive for excellence in their products, indexing journals in several databases and using English as their language of publication, allowing more visibility to the international audience and contributing to a greater number of citations of articles.

EXPLORANDO O DESCONHECIDO: AS CONTRIBUIÇÕES DE VIAJANTES NATURALISTAS PARA AS CIÊNCIAS NATURAIS NO BRASIL DO SÉCULO XVIII E XIX

Quando o intuito é discutir sobre paisagem, ambiente e ciência no Brasil, obrigatoriamente devemos nos remeter as contribuições e pesquisas proporcionadas pelos viajantes naturalistas no Brasil durante o século XVIII e XIX. A grosso modo, o viajante naturalista é considerado aquele que, durante o período aqui referido, dedicava-se exclusivamente ao estudo da história natural, compreendendo a dinâmica dos elementos que circundam a Terra. Dessa forma, pretendemos aqui descrever rapidamente as contribuições de importantes viajantes naturalistas que atravessaram o território brasileiro no período referido: Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira; Maximilian de Wied von Neuwied; Johannes Natterer; Castelnau e Deville; Langsdorff; Martius e, por fim, Auguste de Saint-Hilaire. Por fim, podemos dizer que as extensas expedições realizadas pelos viajantes naturalistas que vieram ao Brasil representaram importantes contribuições para o entendimento e compreensão do nosso próprio território, tanto no que diz respeito a dinâmica ambiental da paisagem, descrição de fenômenos naturais, quanto para classificação de fauna e flora.

Project Stakeholder Management: A Case Study of a Brazilian Science Park

The stakeholder management has been a topic increasingly discussed in the literature about project management, though still existing, large gaps to be filled, especially in complex projects such as the implementation of science parks. Thus, in this paper is presented a case of a Brazilian Science Park which shows how the management team of the project identified key stakeholders and established strategies for engagement and collaboration that sought to increase their engagement, get resources and make use of specific capabilities that were required during the lifecycle of the project to the reaching of its goals.

O campo temático das ciências sociais em saúde no Brasil

O artigo apresenta o campo das ciências sociais em saúde, que integra o da saúde coletiva, no Brasil, consolidados na década de 1970. Discute alguns pressupostos sócio-históricos dessa constituição: a reestruturação do ensino médico e das pós-graduações nos anos de 1950 e 1960, que incorporaram as ciências sociais, e a inserção de cientistas sociais nos serviços de saúde no contexto de luta pela redemocratização nas décadas de 1970 e 1980. Problematiza o contato de cientistas sociais com a saúde, tomando-a como objeto, o que resulta na discussão de questões de cunho epistemológico pouco exploradas até então pelas ciências sociais no Brasil: as relações do biológico e do social e a mediação tecnológica na produção social da saúde-doença.

Brazilian Science and Research Integrity: Where are We? What Next?

Building a world-class scientific community requires first-class ingredients at many different levels: funding, training, management, international collaborations, creativity, ethics, and an understanding of research integrity practices. All over the world, addressing these practices has been high on the science policy agenda of major research systems. Universities have a central role in fostering a culture of research integrity, which has posed additional challenges for faculty, students and administrators - but also opportunities. In Brazil, the leading universities and governmental funding agencies are collaborating on this project, but much remains to be done.

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.

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.

ANÁLISE DA EVOLUÇÃO DAS RELAÇÕES DE COAUTORIA NOS PROGRAMAS DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM COMPUTAÇÃO NO BRASIL

This paper describes the basis for a study of the dynamic relationships of (co- )authorship among full time professors from Brazilian Computer Science graduate programs. 889 researchers were identified, working in 45 graduate programs. A robust entity resolution heuristic was developed, allowing the identification of (co-)authorship relationships among researchers with accuracy above 96%. The social network analysis allowed for the discovery of some interesting phenomena about the dynamics of the Brazilian scientific production, related to the increasing in the production within and among graduate programs.

Explainers of science centres and museums: a study on these stakeholders in the mediation between science and the public in Brazil

In this paper, we investigate who are the explainers who work is Brazilian science centres and museums. We used an online survey, which was answered by 370 people from 73 institutions out of a group of 200 scientific and cultural centres. Our results indicate that most of these professionals are young people between 18 and 25 years old, they hold a high school certificate or are attending university, and they have been working in this field for less than five years. Only a fifth declared that they had done professional training before starting their activities; about 60% said that they are not prepared to attend to disabled visitors. We believe that our study will improve the practice of science communication, contributing to the creation of training and professional courses.

Contemporâneo clássico: a recepção de Pierre Bourdieu no Brasil

O Brasil foi um dos casos pioneiros na recepção internacional de Pierre Bourdieu, sociólogo que, desde a década de 1990, tornou-se um dos mais citados em todo o país. Essa questão é discutida articulando-se duas séries históricas: a produção e consagração da obra de Bourdieu a partir da França e a dinâmica da institucionalização das ciências sociais no Brasil. Desde o final dos anos de 1960, a circulação de pesquisadores brasileiros na França aumentou consideravelmente, e alguns deles se constituíram em importantes mediadores da recepção de Bourdieu no Brasil; suas trajetórias e os papéis desempenhados são avaliados neste artigo. Inicialmente recebido como um dos autores contemporâneos mais propensos à renovação teórica e metodológica das ciências sociais nas décadas de 1970/80, o autor seria instituído, a partir da década de 1990, como referência obrigatória, a despeito das resistências que suscitou.

Intrathecal Fentanyl Abolishes the Exaggerated Pressor Response to Cycling Exercise in Never‐Treated Hypertensive Men

Animal and human studies report that the exercise pressor reflex-mediated increase in blood pressure (BP) is exaggerated in hypertensive subjects. Here we investigated the influence of spinal opioid receptor-sensitive muscle afferents on the BP response to cycling in patients with hypertension. Male subjects were divided into 3 groups: Never-treated hypertensive (UT-Hyper; n=5; 48±5 yrs; 149±6/96±4 mmHg), treated hypertensive (T-Hyper; n=3; 42±6 yrs; 141±8/84±5 mmHg), and normotensive (Norm; n=6; 47±4 yrs; 124±5/78±3 mmHg). Beat-to-beat intra-arterial BP and heart rate (HR) were monitored during leg cycling (40 W) for 120 s, before (CTRL) and after administration of intrathecal fentanyl (FENT; 50 μg, L2-L3 or L3-L4 space), attenuating the central projection of leg muscle afferent signal. We also assessed the BP response to handgrip exercise to rule out cephalic migration of FENT. UT-Hyper patients had an augmented BP response (+11±2 mmHg; P<0.01) during leg cycling compared with both T-Hyper (0±2 mmHg) and Norm groups (+4±2 mmHg). Following FENT, BP response of the UT-Hyper group was diminished (+6±2 mmHg; P<0.05) to a similar level to that of the Norm group. FENT neither affected the BP response of the Norm group (P=0.11), nor the HR response to cycling or the responses to handgrip of any group. These findings indicate that the exercise pressor reflex has an important role in mediating the exaggerated BP to exercise in never-treated hypertensive men. Grant Funding Source: Supported by the Brazilian Science Without Borders Program

Fonoaudiólogos brasileiros titulados doutores no período de 2009 a 2013: perfil da formação

OBJETIVO:analisar a formação de fonoaudiólogos brasileiros titulados doutores no período de 2009 a 2013.MÉTODOS:o levantamento dos dados foi realizado por meio de consulta à Plataforma Lattesdo Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico a partir dos termos "Fonoaudiologia" e "doutores", e considerado como critério de inclusão ser fonoaudiólogo e ter-se titulado doutor no período determinado. Os dados foram categorizados segundo as variáveis: sexo, ano de defesa da tese, instituição de ensino, inserção do programa em que a tese foi desenvolvida, segundo área de conhecimento do Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico e temática desenvolvida na tese, de acordo com as áreas estabelecidas na Fonoaudiologia e reconhecidas pela Sociedade Brasileira de Fonoaudiologia. Os dados foram analisados de forma descritiva e estatística. Aplicou-se o teste de associação pelo qui-quadrado e para a análise de tendência foi aplicada a regressão polinomial de segunda ordem. Assumiu-se um nível descritivo de 5%.RESULTADOS:o período avaliado totalizou 271 doutorados defendidos. Desses, maior número de teses foi realizada por mulheres (266-98,2%), no ano de 2012 (72-26,6%), em universidades públicas (216-79,7%), situadas na região Sudeste (188-69,4%), em programas pertencentes à área de Ciências da Saúde (174-64,2%) e de temática relacionada à linguagem (95-35,1%).CONCLUSÕES:o levantamento, somado a pesquisas anteriores, evidencia um total de 775 doutores, com perfil semelhante ao levantado anteriormente, mas diferindo quanto à inserção de fonoaudiólogos em programas de pós-graduação não relacionados apenas à área de saúde, refletindo a ampliação dos diversos campos de atuação desse profissional.

Ciência do Esporte no Brasil: reflexões sobre o desenvolvimento das pesquisas, o cenário atual e as perspectivas futuras

O Brasil foi, recentemente, palco de um dos eventos esportivos mais importantes do mundo, a Copa do Mundo de Futebol de 2014 e, em um futuro próximo, irá sediar os Jogos Olímpicos de Rio 2016. Esses eventos podem ser considerados como uma grande oportunidade para desenvolver a Ciência do Esporte no Brasil. A Ciência do Esporte pode ser definida como o processo científico utilizado para orientar a prática do Esporte, com o objetivo, em última instância, de melhorar o desempenho esportivo. No entanto, apesar deste objetivo, o consenso geral é que aplicação do conhecimento gerado pela Ciência do Esporte na prática ainda é incipiente. Este ensaio revisita o modelo para o desenvolvimento da Ciência do Esporte, proposto anteriormente por Bishop(1) , discute o cenário da Ciência do Esporte no Brasil e também aponta para as perspectivas futuras. As diretrizes do modelo revisitado, em conjunto com as discussões realizadas neste ensaio, podem ajudar o cientista do Esporte a desenvolver estudos aplicados nos quais os resultados poderiam ser utilizados para orientar a prática e, possivelmente, maximizar o desempenho esportivo.