AbstractIdentifying and studying the formation of researchers over the years is a challenging task, since the current repositories of theses and dissertations are cataloged in a decentralized manner in different digital libraries, many of them with limited scope. In this article, we report our efforts towards building a large repository to record the Brazilian academic genealogy. For this, we collected data from the Lattes platform, an internationally recognized initiative that provides a repository of researchers’ curricula maintained by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and developed a user-oriented platform, named Science Tree, to generate the academic genealogy trees of Brazilian researchers from them, also providing additional data resulting from a series of analyses regarding the main properties of such trees. In order to assess the facilities provided by the Science Tree platform, we conducted an experimental evaluation of it with two groups of users, the first one consisting of 286 researchers who answered an evaluation questionnaire and the second one involving seven researchers with large academic experience who agreed to participate in a face-to-face assessment conducted through a personal interview, during which they performed some pre-defined tasks. The results of these two evaluations with typical users enabled us not only to validate the main features offered by the platform, but also to identify new ones that could be added to it in the future. Overall, our effort has allowed us to identify interesting aspects related to the academic career of the Brazilian researchers, thus highlighting the importance of generating and cataloging their academic genealogy trees.
Profile and scientific output analysis of physical therapy researchers with research productivity fellowship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development