METRICS: measurement indicators to evaluate scientific journals in social sciences: an approach to the discipline of communication sciences in Brazil

• Grant number: 09/08808-1
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: August 01, 2009
• End date: July 31, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Information Science
• Principal Investigator: Sueli Mara Soares Pinto Ferreira
• Grantee: Sueli Mara Soares Pinto Ferreira
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The scientific activities in the whole world and in any discipline are usually evaluated based on bibliometric indicators and from scientific journals. This project aims to propose and experiment alternative indicators to evaluate the scientific production of the Social Science field, and to do that it will use a pilot study with Communication Science discipline. However, considering the diversity of products in this discipline and the relevance of monographs and journals in the social sciences, this project is looking for to get these indicators using a comparison study of the journals papers citations and the books citation, both published between 2001 and 2009 in this country. The corpus of study will be composed by the Brazilian researchers / authors production or working in Brazilian institutions, such as: (a) scientific journals papers published by all the brazilian graduate programes in communication science discipline, and (b) monographs such review have been published in those journals or books publishes that have been receive an indication by some experts in this discipline. To identify and collect all the metadata about the papers and monographs in Communication Science it will be used the search engine (harvester) in development by CEDUS team with support from CNPq. The citations study (in papers and books) will be studied with the support of Lemon-8 software developed by the PKP team in Canada. The main results expected are new parameters of quality analysis of the discipline and allowance for better and more complete visualization and mapping of features and relationships between the several publications produced by this researcher community. Also it will give an better understanding of the area. As secondary results, ways should be identified to improve the national indexation system of the Brazilian journals and books in communication science, perhaps leading them to reach the level of quality required to their insertion in national and international indexing sistem. Also to lead them to record the national production in a standardized and systematic way to garantee the access, visibility and preservation of the brazilian memory of this discipline. (AU)