ResumoA recente evolução da ciência brasileira é caracterizada pelo crescimento acelerado da produção científica e pela intensificação da colaboração entre seus pesquisadores. Este trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar elementos sobre o papel da geografia na evolução da produção e colaboração científica no Brasil entre 1992 e 2009, por meio da identificação de padrões espaciais e da importância relativa das regiões em termos de produção, especialização científica e grau de interação colaborativa com outras regiões. Para este estudo, foram desenvolvidas (i) uma base de dados única, composta por mais de um milhão de pesquisadores e sete milhões de publicações científicas registradas na Plataforma Lattes, e (ii) diferentes redes de colaborações (coautoria) científicas entre regiões e estados brasileiros. Embora os principais resultados apontem para a heterogeneidade espacial da produção e colaboração científica, existem fortes evidências de um processo de desconcentração espacial ao longo do tempo associado à expansão das redes de colaboração e ao aumento da participação de autores das regiões cientificamente menos tradicionais, tais como Sul e Nordeste. Observam-se diferenças acentuadas entre as distribuições regionais da produção e as configurações espaciais das redes de cada área do conhecimento. Neste trabalho ressalta-se a importância das redes de colaboração científica no tocante à formulação de políticas de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação no Brasil no sentido de promover o incremento de qualidade e a desconcentração regional da atividade científica e, consequentemente, o desenvolvimento das regiões menos favorecidas. Palavras

The Brazilian Lattes Platform is an important academic/ résumé data set that registers all academic activities of researchers associated with different major knowledge areas. The academic information collected in this data set is used to evaluate, analyze, and document the scientific production of research groups. Information about the interactions between Brazilian researchers in the form of coauthorships, however, has not been analyzed. In this article, we identified and characterized Brazilian academic coauthorship networks of researchers registered in the Lattes Platform using topological properties of graphs. For this purpose, we explored (a) strategies to develop a large Lattes curricula vitae data set, (b) an algorithm for identifying automatic coauthorships based on bibliographic information, and (c) topological metrics to investigate interactions among researchers. This study characterized coauthorship networks to gain an in-depth understanding of the network structures and dynamics (social behavior) among researchers in all available major Brazilian knowledge areas. In this study, we evaluated information from a total of 1,131,912 researchers associated with the eight major Brazilian knowledge areas: agricultural sciences; biological sciences; exact and earth sciences; humanities; applied social sciences; health sciences; engineering; and linguistics, letters, and arts.

An important topic in genomic sequence analysis is the identification of protein coding regions. In this context, several coding DNA model-independent methods, based on the occurrence of specific patterns of nucleotides at coding regions, have been proposed. Nonetheless, these methods have not been completely suitable due to their dependence on an empirically pre-defined window length required for a local analysis of a DNA region. We introduce a method, based on a modified Gabor-wavelet transform (MGWT), for the identification of protein coding regions. This novel transform is tuned to analyze periodic signal components and presents the advantage of being independent of the window length. We compared the performance of the MGWT with other methods using eukaryote datasets. The results show that the MGWT outperforms all assessed model-independent methods with respect to identification accuracy. These results indicate that the source of at least part of the identification errors produced by the previous methods is the fixed working scale. The new method not only avoids this source of errors, but also makes available a tool for detailed exploration of the nucleotide occurrence.

Abstract:The Lattes platform is the major scientific information system maintained by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). This platform allows to manage the curricular information of researchers and institutions working in Brazil based on the so called Lattes Curriculum. However, the public information is individually available for each researcher, not providing the automatic creation of reports of several scientific productions for research groups. It is thus difficult to extract and to summarize useful knowledge for medium to large size groups of researchers. This paper describes the design, implementation and experiences with scriptLattes: an open-source system to create academic reports of groups based on curricula of the Lattes Database. The scriptLattes system is composed by the following modules: (a) data selection, (b) data preprocessing, (c) redundancy treatment, (d) collaboration graph generation among group members, (e) research map generation based on geographical information, and (f) automatic report creation of bibliographical, technical and artistic production, and academic supervisions. The system has been extensively tested for a large variety of research groups of Brazilian institutions, and the generated reports have shown an alternative to easily extract knowledge from data in the context of Lattes platform. The source code, usage instructions and examples are available at http://scriptlattes.sourceforge.net/.

Brazilian scholarly output has rapidly increased, accompanied by the expansion of domestic collaborations. In this paper, we identify spatial patterns of collaboration in Brazil and measure the role of geographic proximity in determining the interaction among researchers. Using a database comprising more than one million researchers and seven million publications, we consolidated information on interregional research collaboration in terms of scientific coauthorship networks among 4,615 municipalities during the period between 1992 and 2009, which allowed us to analyze a range of data unprecedented in the literature. The effects of geographic distance on collaboration were measured for different areas by estimating spatial interaction models. The main results provide strong evidence of geographic deconcentration of collaboration in recent years, with increased participation of authors in scientifically less traditional regions, such as south and northeast Brazil. Distance remains a significant factor in determining the intensity of knowledge flow in collaboration networks in Brazil, as an increase of 100 km between two researchers reduces the probability of collaboration by an average of 16%, and there is no evidence that the effect of distance has diminished over time, although the magnitude of such effects varies among networks of different areas.