Bibliometric analysis of the Brazilian scientific response to the Zika epidemic: research pivots and thematic funding

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In 2016, in face of the Zika virus outbreak, research funding was made available to study the virus and the scientific community directed its resources correspondingly. This resulted in several publications and increased understanding of the infection, the virus, its vector, associated syndromes and mechanisms. Brazil was particularly affected by the outbreak and at the same time had a prominent position in the global scientific production about the outbreak.In this study, we aim to characterize the researchers who engaged with Zika research in Brazil and how funding policy mediated the redirection of research towards particular themes. We performed a bibliometric assessment of the authors in Brazil who worked on Zika as a case study of how individual scientists respond to major changes in the macro research agenda.Using data from Web of Science, PubMed and the Lattes platform, we investigated (1) the pattern of researcher’s “pivots”, i.e. changes in research direction due to the Zika outbreak and (2) the correspondence between funding mandates and the research output.Our results show that while authors engaged with Zika research coming from more apparently distant fields - such as neuroscience -, most of the authors who studied Zika came from the expected fields and themes - infectious diseases or public health. Using a MeSH term-based classification, we also analyzed the output of a particular grant with an specific research agenda, finding a partial correspondence between the funding mandate and the output produced by the grantees.The results obtained are an important addition to our understanding of how research funding can contribute to preparedness policy - a need made more obvious with the COVID-19 pandemic - while opening up new questions and ways of studying the downstream effects of funding policies on individual scientists’ choices of research paths.