As tramas invisíveis da comunicação científica: arranjos institucionais, protagonistas da prática científica e configurações relacionais da ciência nos Boletins do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi

Abstract

This thesis investigates the communicational processes that structure the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in Amazonian institutional journals, taking as its empirical object the Natural Sciences and Human Sciences Bulletins of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Situated within the field of scientific communication and the social studies of science, the study is grounded in the historical, scientific, and symbolic recognition of the Goeldi Museum and its Bulletins as instances of mediation, legitimation, and visibility of science produced in the Amazon. The research problem seeks to answer the following question: how do institutional arrangements, the key actors of scientific practice, and the relational configurations of science manifest themselves in the scientific communication of the Bulletins of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and reveal the invisible webs that permeate the science produced in the Amazon? Thus, the study aims to uncover dynamics that are often rendered invisible by analyses focused exclusively on metric indicators. The general objective is to analyze the communicational processes that traverse the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in the Bulletins of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. The specific objectives are to map the institutions associated with the publications, characterize patterns of authorship and co-authorship, and systematize and correlate the keywords of the publications. The research adopts a mixed methodological approach of a descriptive nature, combining bibliometric and scientometric techniques. The corpus comprises articles published between 2016 and 2024 in the two series of the Bulletin. This period was selected because, from 2016 onward, the publications became digital, expanding their reach and visibility and enabling new analyses of publication impact. The results revealed patterns of authorship, institutional collaboration, and thematic recurrence, indicating the centrality of certain institutions and the integration of the Bulletins into national and international scientific networks. The analysis and discussion of the results demonstrated that these patterns express institutional arrangements, editorial strategies, and symbolic relations that shape scientific communication in a context marked by center–periphery asymmetries, highlighting the role of the Bulletins as spaces for articulating regional and universal knowledge. It is concluded that, in this context, scientific communication should be understood as a relational and cultural practice, contributing to the epistemological affirmation of Amazonian science and to the debate on scientific production in peripheral contexts.