Exploratory Analysis

Exploring Database

DESCRIPTION

In this page, we'll try to attend some curiosities concerning the profile of Brazilian mathematical research.

We collected all curricula registered on Lattes platform on the fields of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics and Probability. From this point, we'll refer to the set of these three fields as only mathematics, as we're considering that all of them, jointly, compounds the Great Mathematics field.

In total, the number of curricula downloaded and analyzed was 11.423. The exact distribution of curricula along the three main fields is presented below.

In the figure above we can see how many researchers are there on each field, on total. But, what about the number of published papers per field?

That we can see on the next chart...

Combined, these two charts shed light on an important feature: even though Computer Science concentrates the larger amount of researchers, the Mathematics field is the one with the higher number of published papers. A detailed explanation behind this fact is out of the scope of this work, but we deeply encourage future works to dive into this matter.

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF AUTHORS

One curiosity of Lattes curricula database is that, even though the largest amount of individuals reported are Brazilians, there are researchers from many locations worldwide that work on Brazilian research institutions or, in some extent, collaborate with Brazilian researchers and do have a CV registered on Lattes platform.

So, why not take a look on the nationalities of individuals on this platform? Please, feel free to navigate on the chart below.

Analogously, we can visualize the number of researchers that work in each country in a similar map. The following chart presents the total of individuals in each country according to their workplace location.

In this next interactive chart, we try to answer the question: Where do researchers work?

NUMBER OF PUBLICATIONS

Moving on, one could ask: How is the number of published papers distributed over the years? We'll present this feature on the next two charts...

As we can easily see, the total amount of publications has been increasing over time. This suggests an increase in total productivity on Brazilian mathematical academia.

Now, let's try to visualize how these publications are distributed per author.

The histogram above shows that the distribution of published papers is highly asymmetric with bigger area over zero. In English, this means that the higher amount of mathematical researchers didn't publish any paper (or at least didn't update their published papers information on the Lattes platform).

Looking at the other tail of the distribution, we can see that some brave heroes published an incredibly large amount of papers. So, let's create a ranking of authors according to their number of published papers.

Wow! The chart above reveals that two researchers had published more than 550 papers! That's an incredible mark. Although, one thing remains unclear...

What are they researching about?

TRENDING TOPICS

First of all, we'll take a quick look on the top 15 journals in which the authors in our database published their papers the most.

We can see that the top 3 journals encompass works related to Computer Science and technology. Even though this last chart clarifies a little bit on the issue, it doesn't answer it completely.

We're actually interested in what topics they're researching inside their respective fields. So, let's clarify this matter by looking into their sub-area of research. The following figure shows the evolution of the number of individuals getting into in the respective sub-area of research.

Now we know that ever since mid 90's, the topic that drives most interest in mathematicians, computer scientists and statisticians is Computation Techniques and Methodologies, followed by Computer Systems and Applied Maths. Indeed, technology has been the trending topic of research in the past few decades, i.e., the sub-area of research that has been more inviting to professionals in mathematical academia.

That's it! Hope you liked it!

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