Online attention to science: who are researching it in Brazil?

Fabio Castro Gouveia, Pesquisador da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil

The internet and social media networks are part of our daily lives. Thus, it is not surprising that researchers and people interested in science share news or brief content containing a link to a scientific paper. This type of dissemination beyond academic environments, which observes the “science shared on the net” (GOUVEIA; SOUZA, 2018), has been researched and measured in the last ten years. However, as it is a recent field of study, there are still few researchers in the world dedicated to it. In Brazil this is no different, and the article “Altmetric studies in Brazil: An analysis from the curricula on the Lattes Platform-CNPq”, published by Transinformação (v. 31), sought to unravel from 94 Lattes curricula found linked to this theme, called “altmetrics” – in Portuguese “altmetria” (GOUVEIA, 2013) – , in which social media networks these studies have been made, where in the country are these researchers, what are their research areas and the terms and themes associated with these researches. The paper provides an overview of altmetrics and its consolidation process in Brazil.

To start with, searches for the curricula in the Lattes base found 37 researchers with a doctorate and 57 without. Next, we also searched for curricula with researches on Twitter, Facebook, and Mendeley (an online reference manager platform available at: http://www.mendeley.com). Crossing the data, we obtained a Venn diagram of curricula on altmetrics and these other topics. It was also identified the main area of ​​activity of each of the researchers and it was found that most of the time they come from Information Science, with Communication in second place.

Graph of terms

Graph of terms in the titles of articles and proceedings with at least three occurrences (n=30) Source: GOUVEIA, 2019.

Filtering the academic productions of the curriculum with altmetrics, only those that effectively dealt with the subject were left. We found 26 journal articles and 36 communications in proceedings. It was then possible to verify the start with mostly theoretical works until those devoted to journal evaluation, science and technology indicators, the role of the librarian, open access, institutional studies, among others came to populate the field. In addition, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Mendeley and also Altmetric (an aggregator of altmetric data available at: http://www.altmetric.com) have been found to be used as data sources, while various reference bases served as research delimitators. The Lattes base itself has been used in altmetric research, as well as studies on theses and dissertations.

When we think about the dissemination, science communication and the scientific debate in social media networks, we realize the importance of observing this process and trying to understand the dynamics that are involved in the online attention of science in Brazil. The study shows that altmetrics researchers are geographically distributed in Brazil, and that the variety of approaches and themes has grown establishing the field. This is a picture of altmetrics research in Brazil since its arrival, which may serve as a basis for further studies.

References

GOUVEIA, F. C. Altmetria: métricas de produção científica para além das citações. Liinc em Revista, v. 9, p. 214-227, 2013. ISSN: 1808-3536 [viewed 4 December 2019]. DOI:10.18617/liinc.v9i1.569. Available from: http://revista.ibict.br/liinc/article/view/3434

GOUVEIA, F. C., and SOUZA, I. P. V. A Ciência compartilhada na rede. Ciência Hoje, v. 346, 20 ago. 2018 [viewed 4 December 2019]. Available from: http://cienciahoje.org.br/artigo/a-ciencia-compartilhada-na-rede/

To read the article, access

GOUVEIA, F. C. Estudos altmétricos no Brasil: uma análise a partir dos currículos da Plataforma Lattes-CNPq. Transinformação, v. 31, e190027, 2019. ISSN: 0103-3786 [viewed 4 December 2019]. DOI: 10.1590/2318-0889201931e190027. Available from: http://ref.scielo.org/tw7mht

External links

Transinformação: http://www.scielo.br/tinf

Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com

Altmetric: http://www.altmetric.com

YouTube em: https://youtu.be/FHcx-tOV4K4

About Fabio Castro Gouveia

Fábio Castro Gouveia

Fábio Castro Gouveia

Fábio Castro Gouveia is a Public Health Technologist at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation – Brazil, leader of the Science, Data, Networks and Metrics Research Group (Scimetrics) and participates as a researcher at the Zika Social Sciences Network. Develops research in the area of Information Science with emphasis on Metrics Information Studies (Scientometrics, Webometrics, Altmetrics, Science and Technology Indicators and Innovation), Digital Methods, STS, Data Science and Blockchain Technology, and in the area of Science and Health Communication, with emphasis on internet and social media studies. E-mail: fgouveia@gmail.com

 

 

 

Como citar este post [ISO 690/2010]:

GOUVEIA, F. C. Online attention to science: who are researching it in Brazil? [online]. SciELO in Perspective: Humanities, 2019 [viewed ]. Available from: https://humanas.blog.scielo.org/en/2019/12/05/online-attention-to-science-who-are-researching-it-in-brazil/

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Post Navigation