A produção científica em sustentabilidade e a contribuição da Ciência dos Materiais

Abstract

Sustainability is an issue that has aroused great interest of society increasingly aware of the need to ensure that development in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. In the academic environment, studies on sustainability began in the late 1960s and intensified after the 1980s, influenced by several factors, including the occurrence of disasters of great environmental impact and that also raised debates about the commitment of survival of mankind and the planet. In this context, this study aimed to analyze the scientific production in sustainability. Special emphasis was given to understanding the contribution of Materials Science and Brazil to the scientific advances on sustainability. The study was based on the production of bibliometric indicators of scientific production from bibliographic records extracted from the database Web of Science. She was chosen for its scope and multidisciplinary, allowing the collection of significant publications on sustainability in different areas of knowledge and insight of the study indicated the foci. To study the contribution of the various areas of knowledge was developed a new procedure for classifying publications. As a result, we obtained indicators of production and scientific collaboration, detailing how the sustainability studies are distributed over time, as the producer countries to knowledge, as to the contribution of each area of knowledge and as to the matters discussed in the research. It was identified that sustainability in scientific production has grown at a rate higher than the growth of the database that represents the scientific world and that this research topic has a global reach, with 173 countries generating publications about him. These results are in line with the growing interest of the society on the issue. About the area of Materials Science, has been identified below the expected contribution, which is only a tenth area contribution to the studies on sustainability. It was noted that research on sustainability in the area of Materials Science began about fifteen years after the first studies on the subject, but now research in the area grow more than the subject in general. On matters of sustainability in the surveyed area of Materials Science can be noted the concern with aspects of construction, with expected attributes of materials such as durability and recyclability, and little attention to the materials themselves, especially if the concrete, biomass, ash and mud. Brazil has a relatively small contribution to the publications on sustainability, but growing at rates much higher than the average of other countries. A feature of the national scientific production on sustainability is its geographic distribution more homogeneous than the average national publications. The study pointed out the importance of sustainability as a research subject, the late and relatively small, but growing, contribution from the area of Materials Science for studies on sustainability and the growing contribution of Brazil to the studies on the subject. She also appointed a new methodological approach for the classification by area of knowledge collected from the publications in Web of Science.