BRAZlLlAN PRODUCTION IN BIOCHEMISTRY INTERNATIONAL VERSUS DOMESTIC PUBLICATION

This work describes a bibliometric survey on scientific production in biochemistry originated from 19 Brazilian institutions, which comprised 487 staff investigators, 70-80 % of active investigators biochemists. These investigators published about 3000 papers in international journals in the period 1970-1985, which generated about 17000 citations from 1983 to 1987, according to the Institute for Scientific Information data base. In this survey we distinguished what we called endogenous articles (produced in Brazil) from exogenous articles (produced abroad by Brazilian biochemists), in terms of the spectrum of journals in which they were published and the number of citations generated per article. A comparison was also performed for the two groups in terms of the impact factor generated by Brazilian articles in a given journal versus the expected impact factor for al1 articles published in that journal. In al1 cases we detected a certain disadvantage for endogenous articles, the possible reason of which is discussed. Biochemistry is one of the scientific areas in Brazil in which the investigators make a large effort to publish in international journals. We observed differences in the impac