Cooperação brasileira com os países do Mercosul (1991-2020): evolução e tendências no campo da pesquisa cientìfica

Abstract

This study analyzes scientific cooperation between Brazil and the full member countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) — Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay — over a 30-year period (1991–2020). Considering that the bloc was established in 1991, the research aims to understand the panorama of scientific production published by Brazil in cooperation with these countries, taking as a reference the co-occurrence relationships of authors’ keywords. Initially, the study presents a historical and institutional overview of Mercosur, addressing its formation and its political, economic, social, and educational developments, as well as the role of science and technology in the process of regional integration. Subsequently, it discusses scientific cooperation, scientific production, and research funding policies within the bloc, highlighting the main agencies, institutional structures, and asymmetries among national systems of science, technology, and innovation. This is a descriptive study with a qualitative and quantitative approach, using the bibliometric technique of keyword co-occurrence as a tool to map the conceptual axes of Mercosur’s scientific production. The research corpus corresponds to Brazil’s scientific production in cooperation with the full member countries, collected from the Scopus database for the period from 1991 to 2020. The study was developed in three stages: surveying joint scientific production; identifying the main production indicators (authors, countries, journals, institutions, and funding agencies); and analyzing authors’ keyword co-occurrence and its temporal evolution using the SciMAT software. The results show Argentina as Brazil’s main scientific partner, accounting for 9,387 articles in the period from 2011 to 2020, which represents 49.7% of its cooperative production over the three decades analyzed. Brazil appears as the main regional articulator, while Uruguay shows progressive growth and Paraguay is in a process of scientific consolidation, with strong dependence on external partnerships. The keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed that Brazil–Paraguay cooperation is concentrated in Health, Biological, and Agricultural Sciences; Brazil–Uruguay cooperation stands out in Health, Biological, Natural, and Chemical Sciences; and the Brazil–Argentina partnership demonstrates broad and interdisciplinary collaboration, with a strong presence of Health and Biological Sciences, as well as significant integration with the Exact and Earth Sciences.