A partnership between the federal and state governments will receive R$13.3 million to improve the quality of science, technology, and innovation (STI) indicators produced across Brazil’s 27 states. The funding, drawn from the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT), will support a fellowship program and computing infrastructure so that every Brazilian state has at least one data scientist dedicated to collecting information and producing comparable metrics that follow common methodologies. The initiative intends to select data scientists from among managers already working in the field in each state, but other professionals, such as university researchers, can also apply.
Training for the specialists will begin in the first half of 2026 and will be conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), a federal research unit specializing in information science. “These data scientists will be essential for feeding the indicators and evaluating the information collected by each state. And because it is a federal fellowship, they will not be affected by political changes in state governments,” says Allan Kardec Benitez, president of the National Council of State Science, Technology, and Innovation Departments (CONSECTI) and head of the Mato Grosso state STI department.
The collaboration is part of an effort to reestablish the National Network of State STI Indicators, which will comprise technicians and managers from the federal Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (MCTI), state governments, and state research funding agencies. The IBICT-trained data scientists will provide technical support. First, they will decide on indicators of common interest to be produced by each state and define the methodologies with which to produce them. An earlier version of the network was created in 2011, but it was eventually disbanded in 2016. “The network’s primary objective is to promote the integration of federal and state science and technology systems by creating channels for information exchange and establishing methods for processing databases, enabling decision-makers to design public policies and plan their actions based on evidence. What we are building is a major national pact in support of state STI indicators,” explains sociologist Verena Hitner Barros, director of the MCTI’s Department of Science and Technology Governance and Indicators.
Initiative provides fellowships for data scientists across Brazil
The MCTI has been releasing annual reports on Brazilian STI indicators since 1998, including a section dedicated to state spending on science, technology, and research and development (R&D). According to Barros, producing comparable state metrics has always been a challenging task because of the heterogeneity of information produced in each state. “Expenditure on STI is not only related to the budget of the science and technology department. It can also come from spending by management, planning, and in some places, higher education. We try to track all expenditure using a list of keywords searched in state databases. Changes in state government structures are not uncommon and make the work more difficult. Much of the information is publicly available, but some needs to be requested, and sometimes through the Access to Information Law,” she explains. “Despite the efforts of the MCTI team to generate comprehensive metrics, it is not uncommon for departments or funding agency representatives to complain that published indicators are incomplete or do not match their own estimates,” says Barros.
In 2011, the MCTI established a network of state representatives to select common data sources and standardize the methodology for calculating expenditure. “The states had data from a wide range of sources and the network held annual in-person workshops to try to standardize the quality of the indicators. They were intense two-day meetings, but it was interesting to bring together specialists dedicated to producing metrics from different locations to exchange experiences,” recalls Joana Santa Cruz, who participated in the network as the representative of FAPESP. She is now deputy manager of FAPESP’s Planning, Financial Monitoring, and Indicators Department (GPAFI). Santa Cruz points out that the new fellowships for data scientists could be important to the creation of stable structures for producing statistics at the state level. “There was a considerable turnover among the people who participated in the network’s workshops. Often, the technicians who received the training ended up being reassigned to other activities and their expertise was lost.”
With the network disbanded, each state continued producing data using its own methods. In 2020, FAPESP—whose mission includes producing science and technology indicators for São Paulo—developed an innovative methodology for calculating R&D investment that incorporates information from a primary survey designed according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Frascati Manual (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue n° 297). Since 2018, public and private institutions conducting science and technology activities in the state have been asked to complete electronic questionnaires every two years, providing detailed information about staff, revenues, and expenses. This information is supplemented and compared with data from official sources on budgets, financial statements, and funding agency resources.
The range of organizations included in the expenditure calculation has also expanded: in addition to state and federal research institutions, private organizations and healthcare institutions that conduct research have been added, including blood centers and public or philanthropic hospitals. This new approach replaced the earlier methodology, which was based exclusively on secondary sources that in most cases failed to determine the true amount invested. These and other metrics on STI activities in São Paulo are available on the website indicadorescti.fapesp.br, launched by FAPESP in April. “The new methodology allows us to precisely identify who funds and who carries out research, which is the method traditionally adopted by many countries in line with OECD recommendations,” explains economist Sinésio Pires Ferreira, an advisor at GPAFI/FAPESP. “Research funding agencies from various states have contacted us to find out more about the methodology, and it is important that it is adopted nationwide to ensure more comprehensive and comparable indicators, both between states and with other countries,” he says.
Fernando de Almeida
Márcio de Araújo Pereira, president of the National Council of State Research Funding Agencies (CONFAP), says that one objective of the national pact is to expand the range of statistics collected, incorporating new topics of interest to the federal and state governments. “For example, there is demand in several regions for metrics on innovation related to the environment,” he says. One point of reference could be the recent thematic editions of the Semiannual Innovation Survey, produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) with funding from the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development (ABDI). The survey examined the use of advanced digital technologies and the adoption of environmental practices by companies. “We are discussing which indicators are essential, looking for existing databases that can support them, and developing common methodologies to generate comparable data. This will help Brazil reduce regional inequalities and create policies aligned with the strengths of each state,” says Pereira, head of the Mato Grosso do Sul Funding Agency for Education, Science, and Technology. Another focus will be cross-referencing information to better understand the participation of men and women in STI activities. “There is currently very little information on researcher and entrepreneur gender that is comparable between states,” says Barros, from the MCTI.
The network was created in response to demand from the state departments of science, technology, and innovation, who lacked the data needed to understand what was being achieved in other states in similar circumstances. “The primary function of state-level innovation indicators is to support public policy development and measure the funding allocated to state innovation ecosystems. Their direct objective is not to be compared, but to demonstrate how to reduce regional inequalities,” says CONSECTI’s Benitez. The council is also working to generate parameters of interest to government departments. In partnership with the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Department for the Development of Public Management and Educational Policies, it began developing an Innovation Development Index for use by Brazilian states and municipalities, with funding of approximately R$1 million from the Inter-American Development Bank. The index is set to be released next year.
Barros notes that the search for more refined state metrics is part of a broader effort to improve the quality of STI data in Brazil. “We are coming out of a period in which important national indicators stopped being updated,” she explains, referring to statistics such as researchers per million inhabitants and private R&D expenditure. The former was compromised by an interruption to the Research Groups Census, which resumed in 2023, while the latter was affected by the absence of the IBGE’s Innovation Survey (PINTEC), which will restart next year (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue n° 355). “The reality is that we are better at comparing our national data with Sweden, France, and the Netherlands—because we produce data according to the Oslo and Frascati Manuals—than we are at comparing Rio Grande do Norte with Rio Grande do Sul,” says Barros, referring to internationally adopted methodologies for STI indicators. “By standardizing our approach, we also want to be able to compare our states with other countries, which makes sense given the size and diversity of Brazil’s national STI system.”
The story above was published with the title “The parts and the whole” in issue 357 of November/2025.
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