A panorama of Brazilian scientifi c production beyond indexing: an exploratory analysis of communication in journals

Abstract Indicators of scientific production are generally used in the evaluation of the academic community. As a quality parameter, the bibliographic databases are used for the selection of the most important scientific journals, a relevant role in the evaluation process. On the other hand, when the analysis is restricted to the indexed production, there is a risk of disqualifying production in journals that are not indexed. Qualis aims to address this issue by enabling areas to value non-indexed journals, even as they do not always consider the volume of articles published in these journals. This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the dispersion of the scientific production of 260,663 researchers with doctorate level registered in the Lattes Platform. For the determination of the national panorama, we considered all the full papers they published in scientific journals between 1998 and 2016. This panorama includes analyzes divided by the researchers’ knowledge areas, the publications’ countries, as well as the indexation of the publications in the different journals. Internationalization trends were observed, as well as the importance of national journals as vehicles for the publication of a significant part of the scientific production in some areas. Additionally, we observed the limitation of studies that do not consider scientific production in non-indexed journals, or studies restricted to Scopus and/or Web of Science databases that do not consider Scientific Electronic Library Online.