Unseen Science: Representation of the BRICs in Global Science

Abstract

A survey of scientific periodical venues for BRIC country practitioners counted more than 15,000 national publications. Data collected from and about Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC countries) shows that 495 publications, or about 3%, are listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded © (SCIE © ) in 2010. Contrary to our expectation of under-representation overall and coverage limitation in SCIE, the average number of SCIElisted publications for the BRICs is about that same as for advanced countries. China has the lowest representation of national publications in SCIE at 2% of all publications; Russia has the highest at about 8%. India has about 6% of publications in SCIE; Brazil has about 4%. In other words, SCIE includes about the same percentage of high quality science from these four countries as for North America and Europe, meaning that these countries are not under-represented in SCIE. The research suggests that the BRICs are using open access journals, with Brazil having 537 open access journals-among the highest number of any country using open access. India is listed as having had 284 open access journals.China is listed as having 15 (with Taiwan at 14). Russia is noted because it is not listed on the DOAJ country list, because it is creating its own open access content. Some of the BRIC national publications are difficult to "see" at the global level because of language barriers, diverse publication formats, and lack of digitization. Other national differences represent historical traditions surrounding publication.

BRICS countries and scientific excellence: A bibliometric analysis of most frequently cited papers

“…WoS data can be used for a comparison of BRICS countries and highly performing countries because both groups seem to be equally represented in the database. According to the results of Wagner and Wong () “high quality science from the BRICs appears to be represented at the same level as more advanced countries” (p. 1009). We downloaded the numbers of records (articles, reviews, and letters) and the numbers of most frequently cited papers from the MPDL database.…”

Peixes Exploradores De Fundo: Uma Abordagem Cienciométrica Sobre Guildas Tróficas

“…Aust., 20(4): 509-519, 2016 países apareceram como os maiores em número de publicações e de citações (King 2004). O Brasil, por sua vez, tem avançado em número de publicações sobre o assunto analisado, refletindo o desenvolvimento científico em relação a outros países (Azevedo et al 2010, Wagner & Wong 2012. Além disso, é crescente o interesse de pesquisadores de regiões Temperadas em desenvolver estudos nas regiões Neotropicais (Azevedo et al 2010), principalmente devido a diversidade aquática registrada nestes locais (Reis et al 2003), aliado ao fato de uma maior internacionalização das instituições de pesquisas a partir deste período.…”

Cartographies of action research: searching for displacements of the epistemology of the South

“…Among the actors involved in the contemporary scientific movement are the major publishers, responsible for indexing scientific journals and for legitimizing and validating the quality of the periodicals registered in their database, limiting the promotion of scientific articles only to a group of companies that control the scenario, forming a "scientific oligopoly" (Larivière et al, 2015) composed by a group of six major companies: ACS, Reed-Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage. The consolidation of this scientific publishing industry has been subject of much debate inside and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to the high margins of profit of these main publishers, their lackluster criteria used to evaluate papers and the publication of researchers' articles, mostly European and North American, silencing and making the knowledge developed in other countries invisible, especially in areas considered less strategic to the global agenda (Wagner & Wong, 2011).…”