Padrões e motivações para o uso do Portal de Periódicos da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior pelos pesquisadores da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This dissertation comprehends the population of researchers at UFRJ, i.e., graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and professors, and investigates their use patterns of the remote access service to scientific publications and the CAPES web portal through the computer network of the university. Within this framework, this study questions the existence of the relation between the use of this access, especially vis-à-vis the CAPES portal, scientific performance and the search for credibility among researchers. The concept of credibility we will take into consideration is the one proposed by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (2008), who suggested that it would be the cause and result of the construction and validation process of scientific facts. We will start from the premise that the remote access service to scientific publications and the CAPES portal consists of a strategic mechanism in this process, albeit not unanimous among users and scientific fields. This case study was structured upon two distinct moments. The first one regards the general characteristics of the remote access service users, based on statistical treatment and data interpretation available in UFRJ's Information and Library System (SiBI), the department responsible for the service. The second one regards the identification and investigation of the reasons for soliciting remote access and the various uses researchers subscribing the service in 2012 make of the CAPES portal. Considering the literature and the relations established in what we call “performance in science”, i.e., the capacity a researcher possesses of producing new information out of article publishing and time investment in research, we defined variables and crossed these variables to answer our research question.