Scientific production about covid-19 in Brazilian information science field: research in the Brapci

Abstract

The metric studies of information allow the visualization both of scientific production in a field of study and of the behavior of certain scientific communities and their vehicles of communication. The general objective of this article is to investigate the scenario of scientific production about covid-19 in the field of information science. As specific objectives, it aims to identify the journals that published articles on the theme and those with the largest number of publications on that subject; to know the most productive authors and the profile of the constitution of the authorship; to list the keywords most used in the articles and the themes addressed in the articles. It presents a basic exploratory research, and a bibliographic outline from the articles indexed in the Brapci - Base de Dados em Ciência da Informação (Database in Information Science) during the period from 2020 to May 2021. Two outcomes can be seen: the study identifies 178 articles published in scientific journals which deal with the theme covid-19 and presents 13 thematic categories revealing the diversity of themes addressed by the authors. It considers that in addition to the classification by Qualis Periódicos, other elements were taken into account by the authors in order to choose the periodical in which the article would be published, such as the call for thematic and special editions, as well as the focus and scope of the journal. It concludes that the effort of the scientific community involved with information science and related fields to publish on the theme covid-19 is configured both as a trend, since it is an emerging theme in an environment where the pandemic is growing, and as an expression of the need to deal with issues related to it, corroborating the social character of information science.