BRAPCI Explorer: a new web environment for bibliometric analyzes based on the BRAPCI

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

In the field of Information Science, the Referential Database of the Database of Journal Articles in Information Science (BRAPCI) is a national reference. However, compared to other databases, BRAPCI provides limited bibliometric metrics.

Objective:

This search proposes a new web environment, named BRAPCI Explorer, aimed at bibliometric analyses. This would be achieved by requesting data through the BRAPCI database API, expanding and structuring the data visualization.

Methodology:

An R programming language code was developed to extract data from BRAPCI via API, organizing and structuring the data into an interactive website. This code generates a co-authorship network, tables of author and publication source frequency, a production graph per year, and calculates bibliometric indicators, including the quantity of distinct authors, average documents per author, co-authorship index, totally different sources, average documents per source, and per year.

Results:

When testing the new environment, a search with the term ”scientific production“ yielded 3099 distinct documents produced by 3494 distinct authors in 51 distinct publication sources. BRAPCI Explorer was capable of generating the coauthorship network as well as preparing all tables and frequency graphs, in addition to calculating the indicators.

Conclusion:

It is concluded that BRAPCI Explorer contributes to a better visualization of the data provided by BRAPCI because it presents enhanced visualizations in the form of networks, graphs, and tables, along with bibliometric indicators, all in a single environment.

KEYWORDS:
Bibliometrics; BRAPCI; Application Programming Interface (API); Data Visualization; Web environment