Profile of the research production in Human and Social Sciences in Health and researchers' perceptions: Strides, limits, and challenges

Abstract

This article aims to establish a profile of research production by professors in the field of Human and Social Sciences in Health (HSSH) in graduate studies programs in Public Health, focusing on the period from 2004 to 2012 (three consecutive three-year of the assessment by the Brazilian Graduate Studies Coordinating Board - CAPES), as well as the researchers' views of the publishing process and the main challenges. The data sources were the CAPES assessment notebooks from 2004 to 2012 and the research output recorded in the Curriculum Lattes database for 176 professors from the HSSH field accredited in the graduate studies programs in Public Health in the same period, obtained from the ScriptLattes tool. Online questionnaires were answered anonymously by 59 researchers, besides in-depth semi-structured interviews with 19 researchers from different generations, in addition to incorporating the authors' perceptions from both data sources on the field's recent situation. Research output in HSSH increased by 60.49% in the production of articles and 25.22% in the production of books in the period studied (62.36% of the research output was published in the form of articles). However, the number of researchers did not increase during the period, which may be explained by the difficulty in accreditation in the graduate studies programs due to growing pressure to publish. Researchers from the field expressed dissatisfaction with various aspects of the science publishing process and the effects of CAPES assessment, including the push for "productivism", overlooking differences between areas in research production tempos and processes, a situation that can compromise Public Health's inherent interdisciplinarity.