An analysis of the Brazilian researchers on freshwater fish genetics and reproduction as coauthors in academic papers

ABSTRACT

Science is a social activity in some senses first, in any of its fields science is an accumulated body of knowledge inherited from generations of antecessors by its practitioners, the scientists. In second place, the results of the scientific findings are shared socially and finally, those results to be successfully achieved demands from the researchers a high grade of collaboration, through the formations of a social network. The collaboration between researchers may result in the publication of an academic article. This publication serves as an index of the existence of a social network of collaboration between researchers and may reveal how a specific field of knowledge has been established, who are the researchers that act as facilitators among colleagues as well as to give some clues about the direction the specific field may unfold.The objective of this work was apply techniques of Social Network Analysis on the community formed by the Brazilian researchers, that are granted a CNPq scholarship on research productivity, with an interest in genetics and reproduction of freshwater fishes. Their linkage in co-authoring research papers published byacademic journals were examined. For the determination of this community and the academic articles, the existing data of researchers in the PlatformLattes of the CNPq database were extracted through the applicative ScriptLattes, which search for the works published in co-authorship. Later, on these data was applied a software dedicated to the Analysis of Social Networks, and graphs of social network and some of its metrics were obtained. The analysis found the Lattes CVs of 33 researchers who published 1156 articles in co-authorship in 502 different journals. As a result, the analysis shows that these researchers form an academic network with low density, and in twenty periodicals were published 25% of the articles produced in co-authorship by those researchers.