Does faculty disciplinary background play a role in the publication pattern of an interdisciplinary research area? The case of science education in Brazil

Abstract

Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities is published in a variety of formats and types of documents. Local journals are relevant for these fields, particularly in non-English-speaking countries, but coverage of large bibliographic databases is still limited, leading to a large percentage of non-source items. This is an acknowledged challenge for Performance-based Research Funding Systems and also for national evaluation exercises, such as the evaluation of the graduate degree programs performed by CAPES in Brazil. Our assumption is that the evaluation of interdisciplinary research may face similar challenge, particularly when faculty´s disciplinary background is predominantly from the Social Sciences and Humanities. The purpose of this article is to analyse an interdisciplinary research area in Brazil to calculate the percentage of non-source items in its scholarly output, in comparison to the 3 areas in which the majority of its faculty graduated. We extracted 11,000 publications reported by 140 degree programs from the Teaching area -also known as Science Education, and found 77.5% of non-source titles. We also analysed another 50,000 publications from the Education, Astronomy/Physics and Chemistry areas. Comparison showed that the Teaching Area had a similar publication pattern to the Education Area, and typical of the Humanities, which is the predominant Major Area of its faculty graduation. Our conclusion is that faculty disciplinary background may influence publication patterns and stakeholders involved in research evaluation should consider using alternative sources of data when assessing the scholarly output of interdisciplinary research, besides the main international bibliographic databases.