VISIBILITY AND SCIENTIFIC IDENTITY
IS GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN THE LEGAL AMAZON
Keywords:
scientific production, Legal Amazon, scientific identity, graduate educationAbstract
The Legal Amazon, which comprises nine Brazilian states, holds a peripheral position in the national science and technology system, and only in recent years has it consolidated graduate programs in Information Science. The dissertations defended in these programs embody a distinctive research agenda, often rooted in regional themes. This study aims to analyze the themes of this production and to discuss its visibility as a strategy for asserting a regional scientific identity. The study draws on the center-periphery approach to scientific production and on contributions from the sociology of science regarding the scientific field and scientific identity, articulated with the open access movement and with visibility and digital attention metrics (altmetrics). A qualitative, exploratory, and documentary approach is adopted, taking as corpus the dissertations and theses defended in the region's three Information Science programs. Data were collected from institutional repositories and theses and dissertations databases, and submitted to content analysis, with the construction of thematic categories. Preliminary results indicate the predominance of themes related to Amazonian memory and heritage, information mediation, traditional communities, environmental information, and the organization of regional collections, with a greater volume of production in the oldest program and emerging contributions from the others. It is concluded that regional production configures a singular scientific identity whose visibility, enhanced by open access and by its own communication channels, strengthens the place of the Legal Amazon in Brazilian science.