Mapping the research field of social thought in Brazil: a preliminary analysis of its production in articles

Abstract

This article seeks to respond to some of the challenges of systematization, indexing and dissemination of various academic documents in the field of social thought in Brazil by the BVPS – Biblioteca Virtual do Pensamento Social (Virtual Library of Social Thought). We argue that the importance of the discussion on digital preservation for the BVPS fulfils two objectives: that of making digitized documents available to a wider audience and that of mapping contemporary production in that field in order to create an intellectual memory. In this article, we will focus mainly on the second objective, in order to define as well as make  available to the library public the selection and organization criteria of the collection. Within the limits of the proposed clipping, we will present here a preliminary analysis of the production of articles in the field of social thought in Brazil through networks of bibliographic coupling, co-quotation and semantic maps. The current research is fundamental for the defiition of the next steps to expand the content of the library, notably the defiition of new search options the integration of new authors in the section Interpreters and the indexing of works containing important themes and approaches for the area of social thought in Brazil.