Evaluation of Brazilian research output in education : confronting international and national contexts

Abstract

Scientific production has increased considerably in the last two decades in Brazil, placing the country as an emerging scientific power. In the field of Education, the same can be observed, with a significant growth in the number of articles published by Brazilian researchers in the recent past. In this article we evaluate Brazilian research output in Education from 2007 to 2016, with the intent to understand how national evaluation standards compare with international parameters dictated by bibliometric indicators. We confront the citation impact of Brazilian publications in the period with their classification in an expert-based journal evaluation system called QUALIS. We used Scopus’ SNIP bibliometric indicator for this analysis. The study was carried out using data about 40,825 articles published in 2719 different journals. Results showed that only a small percentage of these articles featured in Scopus indexed journals (13.28%), and most of these journals were published in Brazil (66%). The citation impact of the Scopus indexed publications had a significant growth in the period, but journals with dissimilar citation impact were not distinctively distributed in separate QUALIS categories. These findings show a certain publishing pattern that is likely to be related to the association of the Brazilian research evaluation and funding systems. In addition, they raise questions about how the establishment of evaluation criteria that is mainly subjective and does not include specific metrics may hinder the visibility of research output from a global perspective.