**4. Brazilian situation in the analyzed context**

In this article, special emphasis was given on the influence of international cooperation on the qualitative performance of scientific production. In the analysis presented here, which identifies in the low international scientific collaboration the unfavorable position of Brazil as concerned to the citations and impact of its publications, whether in the world context or in its position among the countries of the two economic blocs in which it participates, the MERCOSUL and BRICS. It is important, however, to point out that other factors, not discussed in this article, can influence the impact of scientific publications such as the size of the scientific community in each area of knowledge, the language, the maturity level of the areas in each country (or even the global world maturity of the same areas), and the degree of priority given by government agents to the technical and scientific development of certain areas with a view to explore comparative advantages as well as focusing the economic and social development of the countries.

As noted in an earlier study, the unbalanced and asymmetric international collaboration introduces profound distortions in the qualitative data of scientific production (citations, impact, world impact) of numerous countries and in the world, thus interfering in the expectations of scientific, technological, social, and economic development of the countries dependent on this type of international cooperation [14]. In this sense, in a recent article, Silva [22] deals with the relationship between productivity aspects and the quality of scientific production in the countries. The author makes severe criticism regarding comparisons of the scientific performance of Latin American countries. The author points out that it would not be appropriate to congratulate to some countries based on a simple analysis of these issues, since some countries have differentiated productivity in terms of their research and development priorities, with a high degree of self-financing, whereas the scientific production in other countries is highly dependent on the participation of international research groups and external financing. In our opinion, this

*Scientometrics Recent Advances*

**Country Total** 

**Latin American**

**Figure 5.**

**BRICS**

4 South

Africa

**country articles**

*InCites dataset updated 2017-04-15. Includes Web of Science content indexed through 2017-02-03.*

**Total articles**

 Mexico 175,970 5495 3,1 1.0 Argentina 133,349 9404 7.1 1.7 Chile 87,419 5007 5.7 0.9 Colombia 42,021 4954 11.8 0.9 Venezuela 11,920 1722 14.5 0.3 Cuba 12,892 1692 13.1 0.3 Peru 14,331 1651 11.5 0.3 Uruguay 21,667 1251 5.8 0.2 Costa Rica 6972 1009 14.5 0.2 Ecuador 7562 664 8.8 0.1 Panama 4941 421 8.5 0.1

*International collaborations in scientific publications in WoS of the BRICS countries in 2000–2016. Source: ESI-*

1 China 2,275,635 5818 0.3 1.1 2 Russia 713,637 5401 0.8 1.0 3 India 510,662 4742 0.9 0.9

**Brazil 539,049 — — —** *Source: ESI-InCites dataset updated 2017-04-15. Includes Web of Science content indexed through 2017-02-03.*

*Scientific collaborations of Latin American and BRICS countries with Brazil in 2000–2016.*

**Collaboration with Brazil Collaboration on** 

**Collaboration %**

**data from Brazil %**

**106**

**Table 5.**

Based on the set of results shown for the Latin American and BRICS countries, we analyzed the scientific cooperation of these countries with Brazil. **Table 5** shows the total production data of the Latin American countries and the components of the BRICS group, the number of joint publications with Brazil, and the respective

147,248 2737 1.9 0.5

observation is aligned with a high degree of international collaboration. It remains to be seen whether in such situations there are the expected technical and socioeconomic advances that this circumstance imposes on the dependent countries.

Concerning the specific case of Brazil, it is observed that the sharp growth of scientific production (see **Figure 1**) occurred in a short period of about four decades. This growth is clearly linked to the postgraduate programs since its installation in the late 1960s, resulting in the domestic training of thousands of teachers and doctors as well as research groups in universities and other centers, throughout the country. Although many researchers have enjoyed the possibility of partial or full training abroad since the 1970s, international collaboration in comparison with other countries has been less intensified and restricted to a few groups more oriented toward this form of production of new knowledge. This resulted in the small participation of Brazil in cooperative projects worldwide, a situation that affects, above all, the citations and, consequently, the impact of Brazilian science.

Nonetheless, it is also noted that, in several areas, the result of this domestic scientific development allowed Brazil to occupy a prominent position worldly wise. Examples are the work in the fields of tropical medicine, dentistry, parasitology, agriculture, energy, biofuels, and more recently, in the studies on Zika virus and microcephaly. Also, as a result of the recognized qualification of human resources through the postgraduate courses and the consolidation of research groups in strategic areas, many technological sectors have had great development in recent years. Examples are deep water oil exploration, tropical agriculture, pulp and paper industry, aircraft production, offshore platforms, the metal-mechanic working industry, alcohol and biofuels, and banking automation, among others. The results of this development can be seen in the fact that Brazil occupies outstanding economic position (ninth) [23] in the ranking of the countries with the highest GDP in the world wise and the second (after the USA) highest per capita GDP (US \$ 15,359) among the most populous countries in the world.

Thus, the scientific and technological output of Brazil in several fields seems to confirm that the presence of internal training in human resources and infrastructure for research and development, even in the absence of strong international cooperation, can make it possible to attain significant scientific and socioeconomic advances in a short period of time. On the other hand, quantitatively unbalanced and technically asymmetric international cooperation, as is the case with about 70% of the countries analyzed recently [14], is certainly disastrous in enabling these countries to reach adequate levels of development to confront their social and economic challenges.
