The Life Sciences - the relative contribution of the University of S&;#227;o Paulo to the highest impact factor journals and to those with the largest number of articles, 1980 to 1999

Summary The contribution of Brazil to the database of the Institute for Scientific Information, ISI, has increased remarkably during the last years. Among the Brazilian research institutions, the publications of the University of São Paulo (USP) have been around 30% of the country's total publication within the ISI database. A similar share was found for USP's publications published in the 1980-1999 period and classified in the Life Sciences. This was observed in publications from both the highest impact factor journals and from those with the largest number of articles. We have found that the present share of USP's publications in some of the fields of the Life Sciences was much less than 30%, suggesting a gradual decentralization of the scientific activity in Brazil. The data point out that this set of USP's publications were concentrated in traditional and basic fields of biological research, where the focus is mainly oriented by international trends. The data suggest that USP's researchers have not been much devoted to some of the fields where research is oriented toward national issues.     

Recognition and international collaboration: the Brazilian case

The number of Brazilian publications in the Institute for Scientific Information database, ISI, increased significantly in the last 20 years, comprising more than 1 percent of the database in the last two years. The relationship between size and recognition of Brazilian science, estimated by number of ISI-indexed publications, p, and citations, c, obeyed a power law, c = k pⁿ. The value of n, a known indicator of such relationship was 1.42 ± 0.04, significantly higher than that found for the whole set of ISI-indexed world publications. The recent growth of Brazilian publication was not solely due to international collaboration, since over the last six years international collaboration, estimated as the percentage of Brazilian publications having at least one foreign address, reached a constant value of ca. 30%. International collaboration increased the impact of Brazilian publications. Although the most frequent collaborating countries are those that produce the largest percentage of world"s science, Brazilian collaboration with Argentina and Chile exhibit impacts comparable to the major science producers. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.