METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES OF THE RESEARCHES IN KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION AND REPRESENTATION IN BRAZILIAN CONTEXT

ABSTRACT

Scientific knowledge is characterized as rational, systematic and verifiable, its verification is made possible through scientific methodologies. The construction of scientific knowledge requires the adoption of appropriate methods according to the characteristics of the different areas. This study focused its analysis on Knowledge Organization field, which is nuclear in Information Science, as in a simplistic way, it makes possible information organization through concepts explanation and their relations in a contextualized way, improving information retrieval. The main objective was to know the methodological approaches used by the researchers in Knowledge Organization area. The research is characterized as exploratory, with a qualitative-quantitative approach, and uses the bibliographic research as methodological procedure. The corpus was composed of 184 papers presented in Working Group 2 of the Encontro Nacional de Pesquisa em Ciência da Informação (ENANCIB), between 2013 and 2017. It was observed a predominance of woks with a qualitative approach (90.2%), which seems to correspond to the nature of the object studied: the concept. It was possible to verify that most researches (76%) are theoretical, that is, they verify, analyze and construct theories. Of the 184 papers analyzed, 82 presented more than one methodological procedure, of which 4 presented more than 2 methodological procedures. It is verified that it is recurrent the lack of clear indication of the adopted methodological procedures, weakening the validation of the researches. It concludes that the researches in Organization of the Knowledge, in the Brazilian context, develop researches with qualitative, theoretical approaches and that are fomented by the own scientific literature.

KEYWORDS:
Knowledge organization; Information Sciences; Scientific methods