KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS IN ARTICLES ON SCIENCE COMMUNICATION: A STUDY BASED ON CITATIONS IN JOURNAL ARTICLES IN THE FIELD OF INFORMATION SCIENCE IN BRAZIL

Abstract

This study is founded on the assumption that journal articles represent the published science in a specific area of knowledge and that citations and co-citations give an indication of relationships established between researchers, thus allowing a knowledge network to be mapped. Based on the analysis of the articles and citations in the articles that refer to science communication published in the principal information science journals in Brazil, this study seeks to map and show the development of research in the field in the country. The results show that the most influential authors on the theme are academics from Science Communication, the most cited of whom are Meadows and Mueller. There is a high frequency of national authors among the most influential, and this shows the growth and consolidation of the field in Brazil. The theoretical influences in Science Communication in Brazil come from work within the field and also from the philosophy and history of science. This shows that Brazilian Science Communication has a corpus of significant work and research that are cited in the articles produced. The network is tightly connected, and there appear to be no isolated communities. However, there is a grouping of certain studies and authors around the most influential authors. Based on these results one can infer that the field of Science Communication in Brazil is developed in the main by educational institutions with study groups and/or post-graduate programmes with a research line in common with the subject at hand; it is connected with a group of researchers – authors of the scientific articles and also the cited authors – who work in universities and develop studies in the field, making it possible to assert that this group influences and inspires Science Communication in Brazil. The research process showed that bibliometric citation and co-citation analysis techniques are able to show standards and key elements of production in science communication published in Information Science journal articles in Brazil. It is important to remember that the results of any study are conditioned by the theoretical suppositions of the study, the samples chosen for analysis, and that they show reality like a photograph of a particular moment of production and within the established limits of the aims defined in the study.