Scientometric Analysis of Research Output from Brazil in Response to the Zika Crisis Using e-Lattes

E-lattes (Sampaio et al., 2019) is a data-mining tool that provides visualization of knowledge and de-duplication, extraction services from academic records (Lattes CVs) registered in the Brazilian scientific curricular database called Lattes Platform. The tool enables the study of multiple research topics ranging from research groups’ performance to gender bias (Huang et al., 2020), science mapping (Chen, 2017), mentorship (Liénard et al., 2018), and academic genealogy (Damaceno et al., 2019).

In this article, we use e-Lattes to map the Brazilian scientific research response to the emergency of the Zika virus (Liu, Shi, & Qin, 2019). Additionally, we want to investigate whether the tool can provide supporting information for funders on the performance of different research groups, as well as validate the past research funding policies and support the development of new strategies.

In order to analyze this bibliometric event, the rapid growth in scientific publications on a specific topic, with concentrated cases in Brazil, we used the e-Lattes software (Sampaio et al., 2019), built using R language with support for statistical analysis and graphing, to analyze the data.

In 2016, Zika caused a public health crisis in Brazil (Oliveira et al., 2020). In that same year, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it an international public health emergency. Immediately, various research groups directed their attention to research the Zika virus infection, transmission, and control, as well as the social impact of severe forms of the disease in the most affected societies.

We propose to apply the e-Lattes to validate the streamlining policies of research funding implemented by the Brazilian government between 2015 and 2018 inclusive. These policies aimed to speed up research to develop vaccines and other technologies to control the virus.

After 2016, Brazilian scientific production on Zika increased sharply, although just a few core journals by that time had published on the topic (Singh, 2016). The world wide scientific production increase after 2015 has been attributed mainly to the association of Zika with microcephaly (Martín-Acebes & Saiz, 2019). However, we think it also can be associated with the adoption of the fast-tracking funding policies designed to facilitate a rapid response from the scientific community (Singh, 2016).

Below we show a scientometrics analysis of research output from the ZIKAV group during the public health emergency. 853 articles were written, of which 661 can be found on the Web of Science.

The next analysis focused on supervision of masters dissertations, doctoral theses, and post-doctoral work, performed by the researchers. Given that the time to carry out Ph.D. research and writing up is long, the number of theses found was not very high. However, we expect an increase in the following years. Masters dissertations, on the other hand, are done in a shorter time and they show how intensely researchers adopted the subject. We also analyzed post-doc researchers supervised by a ZIKAV research group. However, for this type of academic supervision, the format of the work produced might have different outcomes, such as articles or books, and book chapters.

The number of masters dissertations was 2,668 for the period from 2015 to 2018. However, we only found 70 research works with titles including the term Zika, of which 46 were masters level, and 24 Ph.D. level. On the other hand, we did not find any post-doc work on Zika, this term was not cited in the titles of the 213 post-doc research pieces analyzed. The total number of post-doc researchers of the analyzed set from 2015 to 2018 was 344.

Table 1 presents the distribution of all the scientific articles that include the word Zika in their titles. The number of short and complete conference articles (131 + 18) is notable. Furthermore, Figure 2 illustrates the considerable increase in the number of researchers interested in the Zika topic between 2015 and 2018.

Figure 2

Additionally, Figure 3 and Table 2 show, respectively, the top 19 Brazilian researchers who work on Zika and their affiliations.

Figure 3

To streamline the funding of research to respond to the Zika crisis, worldwide research funding agencies approved a new fast-track research funding policy for emergencies and the acceleration of research and development processes.

The bar plot in Figure 2 shows that the number of collaborations among Zika researchers during the public health emergency increased. This could demonstrate researchers’ concern for the emergency as well as their response to increased research funding.

This funding policy also gave rise to diverse national scientific events producing a high rate of co-authorship between the key researchers investigating Zika, see Figure 3. Additionally we found that most articles on Zika from Brazil were published in conferences within Brazil, resulting in intense information exchange within the Brazilian community.

The funding and complexity around the Zika problem probably attracted researchers with diverse research skills represented by the CNPq knowledge area classification scheme, see Table 3. Despite this, more than 90% of the Zika researchers were from Health and Biological Sciences. They are principally from the areas of collective health and the areas of medicine.

The results suggest that the fast-track research funding model adopted by the Brazilian government did accelerate the development of the research on Zika. However, it is necessary to highlight that we did not assess any dimension of research quality (Aksnes, Langfeldt, & Wouters, 2019), including the scientific impact and societal value.

Additionally, the results also indicate that e-Lattes can provide supporting data on different types of research groups by mining the Lattes CVs and can help the funding agencies to validate their research funding policies and devise new projects.

Understanding how the Brazilian scientific community reacted to the recent public health Zika emergency is revealing. In this article, we demonstrated the use of the e-Lattes R package in a specific context. From the Lattes CVs of researchers acting in scientific research in Brazil, we validate the streamlining policies of research funding implemented by the Brazilian government to speed up the research on Zika.

Our results suggest that such policies boost research. We also conclude that from the data in the Lattes CVs, an assessment can be made from a broader perspective, one that takes into account not only scientific production but also the training of human resources through academic orientation and scientific collaboration.

Additionally, there are many challenges that still need to be overcome. The main one is combining data collected from Lattes CVs together with the publication and citation database from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) (Li et al., 2019), for instance.

Furthermore, we speculate that the international community could make use of e-Lattes in many ways. One possibility is to combine processed data with publication and citation data from a second database to consider the connection between researchers outside and inside the Lattes Platform.

Lane (2010) discussed how adequate incentives for researchers and academic institutions to use the Platform made Lattes a reliable and robust resource. In this sense, we believe that this model, which analyzes the profile of the researcher associated with his production, can be replicated by the international community.

In addition, the Platform's data could be extended or enriched with citation data and related metrics that, among other things, facilitate academic decision-making activities (i.e. hiring researchers, promoting jobs, financial support for research projects). In this context, e-Lattes acts as a model and infrastructure that facilitates the availability of data from the Lattes Platform and possible integration with other databases through data such as DOI and others.

Lastly, we believe that the wealth and increasing reliability of the information on the Lattes Platform justifies the attention of the international community as well as the Brazilian academic community. There is currently no other database with 6.5 million CVs such as Lattes.