Brazil

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Profile

Brazil appears in this library as a group of research institutions whose scientists have contributed more than one paper to the collection. The group includes public federal universities, a Catholic university and the Brazilian research arm of a multinational technology company. The library orders them by the cited work their researchers produced while affiliated with each one. The country entry therefore does not describe Brazilian science as a whole. It shows the part of Brazilian research that has reached this site, and the institutions through which that work was done.

The institutions are in several of the country's major cities: Porto Alegre in the far south, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the southeast, Belo Horizonte inland in the same region, and Curitiba in the south. All of them are in the southern and southeastern half of the country. On this site, no institution from the north, the northeast or the centre-west yet qualifies for the list. That may change as the collection grows, so it reflects the library's holdings and should not be read as a statement about where research happens in Brazil.

The entry can also be compared with other countries and with other kinds of organisation through the library's general directory of institutions, which gathers universities, laboratories, companies and other bodies from around the world.

The institutions on this site

The first institution in the page's order is the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, a university in Porto Alegre. Several works in our library carry its affiliation, and they have attracted a moderate body of citations. Of the institutions listed, it is the southernmost.

Second is the Universidade de São Paulo, based in the city of São Paulo. It is linked to only a small number of works here. Those works are cited more often than those of several institutions with a larger presence on the site, so each of its contributions carries comparatively heavy citation weight.

Third is IBM Research - Brazil, the only entry that is not a university. The library classes it as a research institute, located in Rio de Janeiro. It represents corporate research within the country's presence on this site: work done in an industrial laboratory and not in an academic department. A small number of works are associated with it, and their citation record is of a similar order to that of the southern universities.

Fourth is the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte. On citations it stands far apart from every other Brazilian institution on the site. The works connected with it have been cited many times more than those of any other institution in the group. Most of the citation weight that Brazilian institutions carry in this library is concentrated here.

Fifth is the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, a technological university in Curitiba. Together with the Minas Gerais university, it has one of the largest sets of works among the Brazilian institutions on the site. Its works have gathered a citation total comparable to that of the São Paulo university.

Sixth is the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, the second Rio de Janeiro institution in the list after the IBM laboratory. A small number of works carry its name, with a citation record close to that of the IBM laboratory and the Porto Alegre university.

Kinds of institution

Most of the institutions are universities. Within that group, the federal public universities make up the largest share: those in Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais and Paraná. The Universidade de São Paulo is also a public university, though it is not one of the federal institutions named here. The Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro is the one private, church-affiliated university. The Paraná institution differs from the others in being a technological university, a name that points to engineering and applied science.

The one non-university entry, the IBM laboratory in Rio de Janeiro, shows that industrial research also appears in the country's profile here. Rio de Janeiro is the only city with more than one institution on the list. It is home to both the IBM laboratory and the Catholic university, so academic and corporate research from the same city sit side by side in the collection.

Geography

The institutions on this site cluster in a band from Porto Alegre to Belo Horizonte. The southeast has the largest share: São Paulo, two institutions in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. The south is represented by Porto Alegre and Curitiba. Each listed city is a state capital or major urban centre, and each hosts a large university.

This pattern describes only the institutions that meet the library's threshold for inclusion. Researchers at other Brazilian institutions may have contributed single papers to the site without being listed here. Institutions whose work has not yet been added to the collection do not appear at all.

Citation picture

The library ranks the institutions by the cited work their scientists did there. In the page's order, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul comes first, followed by the Universidade de São Paulo and IBM Research - Brazil. The Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais comes fourth, then the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.

The order does not simply follow total citations. The Minas Gerais university has the largest citation total of the group by a wide margin, yet it is listed fourth. The ranking reflects the library's own measure of cited work attributed to each institution, which need not match the raw citation totals of the papers carrying its name. A paper may have many authors at many institutions, and credit can be divided among them. Anyone comparing the institutions should therefore treat the ordering and the citation totals as two separate views of the same body of work.

Several broad features stand out. The Minas Gerais university's very large citation total suggests that at least one of its works in our library has been unusually widely cited. The individual institution pages are the place to see which work that is. The São Paulo and Paraná universities form a middle tier with similar citation totals, though the São Paulo university reaches that level with fewer works. The Porto Alegre university, the IBM laboratory and the Rio de Janeiro Catholic university form a third tier, each with a modest citation record from a small set of works.

Research strengths

The country entry lists institutions, not topics, so it does not by itself show which scientific fields Brazilian research on this site covers. Some cautious inferences follow from the institutions present. The technological university in Curitiba and the IBM laboratory in Rio de Janeiro are oriented towards engineering, computing and applied technology. The large general universities in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro may contribute across a wider range of disciplines. The subjects, works and authors behind each institution's presence are set out on the institution pages linked above. Those pages, not the country summary, are the place to judge the content of the research.

Using this entry

Students, researchers and journalists can use this entry as a guide to Brazilian institutions on the site. It shows which universities and laboratories in the country have more than a single paper in the collection, and where they are located. It also shows how strongly the cited work is concentrated in one university, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, while other institutions in the south and southeast contribute smaller but steady bodies of cited research. It shows that corporate research, through IBM Research - Brazil, forms part of the picture alongside the universities.

The entry should be read with the limits of the collection in mind. It covers only work held in this library, and it changes as papers are added. It does not rank Brazilian institutions against each other outside the site, and it gives no field-wide view of the country's science. Within those limits, it maps where the Brazilian research held here comes from. Each linked institution leads to the people, works and topics behind its place in the list.