Social Science Publications Place Brazil Among Scientific Elite

By Xiu Ying

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – According to data on the number of public resources, scientific output and the importance of this production, since Abraham Weintraub took over as Brazil’s Minister of Education, there seems to be a presumption of lack of productivity and uselessness of the Brazilian social sciences and related areas in comparison, for instance, to the exact sciences.

Such explanations would support proposals for public funding cuts specifically in these areas of knowledge. President Jair Bolsonaro supports this discourse.

However, many researchers find that the areas which have been targeted by the current government have grown in terms of producing scientific articles to a greater extent than the national average in the last decade.

Brazilian scientists increased output published in scientific journals in all areas of knowledge by an average of 67.3 percent, from 2008 to 2017 – placing Brazil among the top fifteen scientific producers in the world.

Applied social sciences, humanities, and linguistics grew at a faster rate — 77 percent, 123.5 percent, and 106 percent respectively, over the same period. The data are from the international Web of Science database.

By international comparisons, in each of the areas of knowledge, Brazil is not doing badly at all. It is among the thirteen countries publishing the most in applied social sciences, ranking 21st in humanities and 30th in linguistics.

The academic world is aware that the humanities publish more results of their studies in book chapters and entire books than in scientific journals.

In recent years, two out of every three books or chapters of academic books published by researchers in Brazil have been from humanities, linguistics and applied social sciences. The information (data from 2013 to 2016) has been provided by Capes, a federal agency linked to the Education Ministry .

Areas such as biological sciences, health sciences, and engineering saw a decline in the production of books and book chapters during the reporting period, while humanities publications grew 16 percent and the social sciences increased 28.8 percent at the same time.

To get a better view, sociologists, linguists, economists, specialists in law and philosophy, among many others, collectively published an average of 167 books or book chapters per day during the reporting period.

The Minister of Education even pointed out that the human areas in Brazil are failing because they would have little relevance and would be little mentioned in new studies.

First, references to books and book chapters are not included in official scientific production indicators. Therefore, the production of knowledge gathered in scientific journals will have more references than those prioritizing the publication of books.

Some scientific areas are more widely mentioned than others precisely because they are more internationalized. Major studies in global cooperation, for instance in astronomy, tend to publish their findings in English. This significantly increases the likelihood of references from other academic works in the future.

In general, this is not true for the humanities — anywhere in the world. These publications tend to prioritize the mother tongue of their countries.

“Hard” science studies, such as exact sciences, tend to be most frequently referred to by new studies as soon as these are published. They become a reference, motivate new work, and promote progress in a specific area for a specific (and relatively short) time.

On the other hand, the results are produced more slowly in humanities and the research “lifespan” is longer. This means that major works (usually books) by prominent sociologists, philosophers, or jurists may take some time to be mentioned, but these may be mentioned in new texts for more than a decade.