Science Tree: A Platform for Exploring the Brazilian Academic Genealogy

Abstract

Identifying and studying the formation of researchers over the years is a challenging task, as the current repositories of theses and dissertations are cataloged in a decentralized manner in different digital libraries, many of them with limited scope. In this paper, we take a step forward towards building a large repository to record the Brazilian academic genealogy. For this, we collected data from the Lattes platform, an internationally recognized initiative that provides a repository of researchers' curricula maintained by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and developed a user-oriented platform to generate the academic genealogy trees of Brazilian researchers from them, also providing additional data resulting from a series of analyses regarding the main properties of such trees. Our effort has identified interesting aspects related to the academic career of the Brazilian researchers, which highlight the importance of generating and cataloging their academic genealogy trees.