Data indicate changes in the distribution of research teams and a greater variety of subjects studied at Brazilian universities
Léo Ramos Chaves / Revista Pesquisa FAPESP
Research capacity in Brazil has grown in recent years, according to a new census conducted by the Research Group Directory (DGP), an inventory of research teams active in the country. In 2023 there were 42,852 groups registered, against 37,640 in 2016—this count was made for the first time in seven years by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). The number of researchers linked to registered groups increased from 199,566 in 2016 to 247,455 in 2023, a rise of 24%—a single researcher may be involved in more than one group. The participation of women, 50% in 2016, rose to 52% in 2023.
This growth has been trending since 2000, according to a technical note published by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) in 2024. The analysis demonstrated that in 23 years, research groups increased in number by 264% (from 11,760 in 2000). Physicist Débora Menezes, director of Results Analysis and Digital Solutions at CNPq, says that this growth has been driven by public policies, especially from 2010. “Examples include the creation of new campi and enhancement of the Federal Technological Education Centers [CEFET], formerly geared toward high school education, which have now become federal institutes,” she exemplifies.
The IPEA study indicates a vertiginous rise in the proportion of groups in the field of humanities between 2000 and 2023, a period in which the figure increased in relative terms from 27% to 48% of groups in Brazil (from 2,288 to 20,544 teams), an average annual growth rate of 9.2%. Among the humanities, human sciences, which accounted for 15% of the groups in 2000, reached 24% in 2023; applied social sciences increased from 8% to 16%, while linguistics, letters, and arts rose from 5% to 8%.
Hard sciences (exact, Earth, engineering, and computer science) saw average annual growth of 4.1% between 2000 and 2023, with life sciences increasing by 4.7%, although both saw decreased participation in the groups as a whole. The most significant reduction was in biological sciences, whose proportion fell from 15% to 8% of the total between 2000 and 2023. Exact and Earth sciences dropped from 15% to 9%, engineering disciplines and computer science from 16% to 12%, and agrarian sciences from 11% to 8%.
According to Menezes, different factors explain the robustness of humanities: on one hand, she says, the field covers areas that qualify the highest number of undergraduate students in Brazil. According to data from the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (INEP), pedagogy, law, and administration were responsible for courses with the most graduates in the country between 2000 and 2023.
Alexandre Affonso / Revista Pesquisa FAPESP
“I also see the effect of the pandemic. It was easier for humanities researchers to work alone—they were not affected by the closure of laboratories during the isolation period,” she recalls. The comparison of DGP data from 2016 and 2023, which encompasses the health emergency period, indicates a more accentuated loss of impetus in areas more adversely affected by the suspension of university activities, such as biological sciences, whose proportion against the total decreased in seven years from 9.7% to 8.2%, and agrarian sciences, which fell from 8.9% to 7.8%.
Economist Tulio Chiarini, IPEA researcher and lead author of the technical note, talks of the need to investigate the reasons for these changes, but suggests some theories. “Researchers in the hard and life sciences were accustomed to setting up formal research groups due to the collaborative dynamic of these areas. This, however, was not so common in the humanities, where research frequently involves more individual approaches. In recent years, the requirements of support agencies for researchers to be registered in groups to participate in certain calls for papers may have driven the institutionalization of humanities groups,” he explains. “Another issue is that humanities research generally does not require much infrastructure or high-cost equipment.”
Diversity of research Another analysis of diversity in Brazilian scientific activity emerged from a study published in December in the Journal Scientometrics on the variety of themes of investigation and interest among Brazilian universities. Researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) analyzed the output of scientific articles by 200 Brazilian institutions with a greater volume of publications between 2000 and 2017, based on data from the Lattes platform.
The study indicated that large public universities stand out for their wider-ranging research portfolios: USP, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), and the Federal Universities of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Minas Gerais (UFMG), and Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) topped the diversity ranking over the period, divided into six triennia. “Despite the fluctuations, the analysis indicates continual growth in research portfolio diversity among Brazilian universities,” highlights computer scientist Luciano Digiampietri, of the USP School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (EACH-USP), one of the article’s authors. The research portfolio brings together the scientific areas in which a university releases publications.
Economist Geziel Fernández, whose doctoral thesis—defended in 2022 at UFSC—formed the basis for the article, says that diversity in university research is essential for the economic development of nations. “Developed countries are known as ‘economies of knowledge’ for their capacity to innovate, integrate different disciplines, and promote technological, scientific, and cultural advances,” he says.
The study calculated the “diversity index,” an indicator measured with the support of free software developed by researchers from universities in Wuhan, China, and Amsterdam, Holland, that takes different components into account, along with the number of areas in which articles were published. The metric considers how these disciplines are related or unrelated, and balance in the distribution of publications among them, using the Gini Index. Originally used to measure income inequality, in this context the index evaluates the degree of concentration or spread of publications among research areas, indicating whether the distribution is balanced or if certain disciplines are treated as priority. “The diversity index is a complex metric. An institution is more diverse not only when it publishes across more areas, but also when there is good distribution among them,” explains statistician Esteban Tuesta, of EACH-USP, another author of the article.
The higher the index, the more diverse the institution; it starts at zero, but there is no upper figure defined. According to the study, USP lead the ranking of Brazilian institutions with an index reaching 85.8 in the last triennium analyzed—from 2015 to 2017. The institution published scientific articles in 448 of the 554 subdisciplines assessed. According to the Brazilian group’s analysis, the very few subdisciplines in which USP did not publish between 2015 and 2017 included history of art, design, and fabrication of chips, ethnic migration, military aviation, and poetry.
Among the most diverse Brazilian universities, UFRGS rose more considerably, from fifth place in the 2000–2002 period, to assume the vice leadership between 2015 and 2017, when it achieved a diversity index of 70 points (see infographic).
Alexandre Affonso / Revista Pesquisa FAPESP
The Scientometrics article pointed to a strong correlation of the diversity index with a number of postgraduate programs run by universities analyzed. The number of master’s and PhD programs in the country—1,434 in 2000—rose to 4,347 in 2017. “The high level of research diversity in large public universities, and its correlation with postgraduate studies, was to be expected because these programs correspond to 90% of the country’s scientific output,” observes Sérgio Salles-Filho, coordinator of the Laboratory for Studies on the Organization of Research & Innovation (GEOPI) at UNICAMP, who did not participate in the study. “The study quantifies this impression and provides indicators where there were previously none.”
The diversity index of Brazilian universities presents a high level of inequality: among those in the first 24 positions during the 2015–2017 triennium, the difference between the leader USP and the last placed, the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), is 62.2 points. “The number of highly diversified institutions in Brazil is small compared to China, with universities in that country presenting more uniform indices than ours,” says Fernández. “Even so, the most diversified Brazilian institutions are on a comparable level to the main Chinese universities,” he adds.
The story above was published with the title “Reality expanded” in issue in issue 348 of february/2025.
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