Medicina alavanca crescimento da pesquisa científica no Brasil

Abstract

I ata published by Capes during the 58th Annual Meeting of Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (BSPS) in Florianópolis, Brazil, in July, show that, even with all the difficulties we are experiencing, research in Brazil is increasing every year. Although the Brazilian economy grew only 2.4% in 2005, scientific research increased 19% over the same period, increasing from 13,313 to 15,777 articles published! Only two countries had a greater development; China with 29% and India with 21%. This occurred even without any increase in the financing of this important activity in Brazil. From this it was deduced that the productivity of our researchers is more efficient, enabling Brazil to ascend one step higher in the estimations of other nations. Our situation is still not comfortable: we are in 17th position in the ranking of the nations, but it is stimulating to know that we are progressing in respect to this important marker that measures the viability of a country. The production of scientific articles in indexed journals increased 50% over the last five years, which means that in three years we will be in 15th position, overtaking two important competitors, Switzerland and Sweden. The area that grew most last year was medicine, which for us physicians, is great news; medicine is responsible for 20% of the publications, beating physics, which produced only 15% of the articles, and so losing the supremacy it had had for many years. For Capes, the advances in the production of articles in medicine are mainly due to strictness in the assessment of the post graduation courses. Independent of the factors that led to this increase, the "conquest" of the first place shows the power of medicine and that the effort of colleagues from all specialties of "writing down on paper" the achievements and medical achievements is producing important fruits. A reflection of this increase in interest for research in Brazil is the rapid growth of the number of accesses to Scielo. According to information from the institution, 6 millions of articles published by Brazilian scientific