**Author details**

*Scientometrics Recent Advances*

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.

among the most populous countries in the world.

economic challenges.

**5. Conclusions**

BRICS group.

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)

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

In this analysis, it can be observed that the impact of publications and, consequently, the greater visibility of science are directly influenced by the index of international collaboration between peers in the same area or related areas. This was evidenced in relation to the most productive countries and in the comparison of Brazil with Latin American countries and with the component countries of the

In the context of scientific production, international collaborations bring mutual benefits to partner countries, and in a broader and wider sense, they promote the social and economic prosperity of the groups involved. However, it should be noted that there should be an expected balance in these partnerships. As analyzed recently [14], the unbalanced and asymmetric scientific cooperation that occurs between many countries with very low scientific production but with

**108**

Cristina Haeffner1,2, Sonia Regina Zanotto3 , Helena B. Nader4 and Jorge Almeida Guimarães<sup>5</sup> \*

1 Post-graduate program in Science Education: Chemistry of Life and Health (PPGQVS) – Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil

2 Faculty of Health Sciences Moinhos de Vento – Moinhos de Vento Hospital, Porto Alegre, Brazil

3 Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE/RS), Porto Alegre, Brazil

4 Department of Biochemistry, Paulista Medical School, Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), São Paulo, Brazil

5 Hospital of Clinics of Porto Alegre; Biotechnology Center – Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

\*Address all correspondence to: jguimaraes14@gmail.com

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
