Desvendando as relações de outras disciplinas com a ciência da informação: um estudo comparativo entre a pesquisa nacional e internacional

Abstract

This research had the objective to investigate in the Brazilian and the international scientific literature the use of the knowledge produced by information science by researchers of other areas. The research had three stages. The data studied in the first stage came from an analysis of citations from SciELO and from the Web of Science. In the second stage we used studies at the national and international level that had already raised the main scientific areas used by the information science and the inverse research was done with the same empirical body used in these works, that is, it was researched which scientific areas used the knowledge produced by information science. In the third step, an analysis was made in a non-probabilistic sample of the results of the first stage, using 15% of the quota of other disciplines the cited the knowledge of the Brazilian and international information science. This analysis used, as support for determination the type of relationship established between the other disciplines and information science, an adaptation of the guide created and used by Bicalho (2009), as well as a series of premises proposed by the author based on the literature of the area. As main results, it was observed that there was a growing trend of utilization of the knowledge of information science by other scientific areas of scientific at both the national and international levels. This fact demonstrates that information science has advanced theoretically and methodologically in a systematic way in the last 20 years. Internationally, information science is epistemologically more consolidated than the Brazilian information science, since, for every five years period analyzed, it was more used by other areas of knowledge or by a greater number of areas of knowledge than in the Brazilian scenario. Results show differences in use (greater or lesser use) of the international production in information science versus of the Brazilian production in information science by some areas of the knowledge. This fact is motivated by differences in the subjects of study addressed by international works versus Brazilian works. The current study verified an expressive use of information science knowledge in the two scenarios by other areas of knowledge, thus indicating that other disciplines potentially establish an interdisciplinary relationship with information science. However, this finding was not confirmed by the analysis done in a sample of 15% of the quota of other areas of knowledge citing the knowledge of information science. The data also indicated that in both scenarios researched (Brazilian versus international) more disciplines use the knowledge produced by information science than information science uses the knowledge of other existing scientific disciplines thus demonstrating the epistemological progress reached by the area in the last decades. Information science ceased to be a scientific discipline that only receives theoretical and methodological knowledge to become also an area that provides theoretical and methodological knowledge to other disciplines in order to occupy more and more space in the millenary list of scientific disciplines. The study showed 3 categories of returns of the external subjects that subsidized the construction of knowledge in the area of information science after being worked epistemologically in the field. The first group consisted of subjects that utilized information science in the same proportion as they were utilized by information science. For example, in the national scenario the external discipline that was most used by information science was administration (in 14.20% of citations) and the external area that most used information science was also the administration (with 15.36% of quotations). The second group consisted of subjects that did not utilize information science in the same proportion as they were utilized by the area. For example, in the international scenario, medicine was the fifth most used area for information science (in 3.37% of citations), but it was only the tenth area that most used information science (with 1.13% of quotations). The third group contained subjects that contributed to information science, but did not use information science. On the other hand, after being sedimented in the field they contributed greatly to fields different from those in which information science sought the knowledge. For example, in the national scenario, the external probability and statistics discipline was among the 20 disciplines most used by information science (with 0.30% of the citations), but did not use the knowledge of the area.However the knowledge produced in the area of bibliometric, which requires much of the theoretical contribution of probability and statistics was widely used by other areas such as education.