Perfil da produção científica em Medicina Tropical na América Latina: análise do termo "Tropical Medicine" na Web of Science

Abstract

It aims to analyze the profile of Latin American production of Tropical Medicine on Web of Science (1945-2016), specifically the articles published in journals. The adopted methodological procedures were as follows: (1) data collection: they collected the data from the Web of Science from the query term “tropical medicine” in the “topic field”; (2) data processing using the Vantage Point; (3) issue identification: the subjects were obtained in the keywords of the articles. They prioritized keywords indicating names of diseases and their causative agents, given the possibility to find out what illnesses receive greater attention from researchers; (4) relationship analysis: the relationships between subjects, institutions producing scientific papers and journals were identified using the UCINET/NetDraw software. As main results, it was observed that: the most fruitful relationships between institutions and subjects are established by Brazilian institutions: Fiocruz (RJ) and leishmaniasis (13); Fiocruz (MG) and leishmaniasis (8); Federal University of Minas Gerais and leishmaniasis (8) and São Paulo University and leishmaniasis (7). The diseases and causative agents with the highest appearance rate in the production analyzed were: leishmaniasis (60), Chagas disease (30), aids (23), malaria (21), dengue (19), diarrhea (13) and tuberculosis (12). Brazil (59%), Peru (9.6%), Venezuela (7.5%) and Cuba (6.9%) are the most representative Latin American countries in terms of production. The most intense cooperation relations between the countries are established between Brazil and the United States. The most representative journal was Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, responsible for more than two thirds of the indexed production.