The evaluation process of Brazilian graduate programs was implemented by CAPES in 1976. It originally intended to generate parameters to guide the distribution of scholarships in the country and, for that, it combined two elements: peer review and the systematic collection and evaluation of data. Our research aims to analyze the evaluation process of graduate programs in Brazil and to verify how it influences scientific production in the country. This project will focus particularly on the Qualis system, a journal classification created in Brazil in 1998 and used in the evaluation of graduate programs.
The Qualis system is kept by advisory committees of each 49 knowledge evaluation areas, following criteria previously defined by those areas and approved by the CAPES' Scientific-Technical Council of Higher Education (CTC-ES). Qualis is used to rank Brazilian and International journals into 7 categories, from most to least relevant in each given area. It is important to highlight that the same journal, when classified in two or more distinct areas, may have different evaluations.
In this project, the scientific production of graduate programs in Brazil in 9 different areas will be analyzed, considering a period of 10 years (from 2007 to 2016). Data obtained from CAPES' databases will be used to identify whether journals with high Qualis evaluation drained scientific production, even if their impact, computed by other standard metrics such as JCR and SJR, was not high.
The conclusions from this work may be of interest to the scientific community in a more general way since it will be possible to observe how the evaluation process may shape scientific production and to what extent evaluation indicators may induce relevant or irrelevant production.
