The Discourse of the Collective Subject in academic publications in Brazil: bibliometric analysis

ABSTRACT

Objective:

A survey of dissertations and theses in the field of Information Science that have used the method of Collective Subject Discourse to express the opinions of a given group of subjects, exploring the social reality of those studied. The Collective Subject Discourse, associated with the Theory of Social Representations, has contributed to descriptive social research to get closer to the reality experienced by individuals, articulating socio-historical-collective representations and supporting the collective information process.

Methods:

It uses the bibliometric research method, with a quantitative approach and descriptive and exploratory objectives, analyzing data from 50 studies, including 36 dissertations and 14 theses, collected from the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.

Results:

The first dissertation to use the Discourse of the Collective Subject in the field of Information Science was in 2005. Four researchers used the method in both their theses and dissertations, with the Postgraduate Program in Information Science at the Federal University of Santa Catarina having the most significant number of studies with 20, 15 of which were supervised by Souza, F. das C. de. The most studied communities were librarians working in university, school and community libraries.

Conclusions:

The use of DSC method in CI has been advancing slowly, showing little adherence in the field and a gap regarding publications involving this domain, despite a certain regularity of research. The variety of subjects identified in the analyses demonstrated the multiple possibilities of using DSC in studies seeking to retrieve social representations, involving the scope of CI.

KEYWORDS:
Discourse of the Collective Subject; Theory of Social Representations; Bibliometric analysis; Information Science; Social actors