Brazil shuts down a high-impact biology program, and Neotropical science loses

On 22 July 2022, the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), a private Jesuit community university in São Leopoldo in southern Brazil, announced the interruption of twelve of its postgraduate programmes. Among them was the Postgraduate Program in Biology, known as PPG Biologia, the very programme whose professors founded the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation. The decision, framed by the institution as a step toward financial balance, struck many observers as a serious blow to Brazilian research. Now, a new bibliometric analysis published in Neotropical Biology and Conservation quantifies exactly what the country stands to lose, and the numbers tell a story of a resilient, internationally connected research engine whose abrupt interruption will be felt across the Neotropical realm.

The research team, led by Unisinos biologist Lucas Krüger, conducted a bibliometric review of papers published by PPG Biologia over the past twenty years to assess its impact on biological research at a national level. Using the Dimensions platform, described as the world’s largest research information dataset with over 130 million registered publications, the researchers searched for the programme’s Portuguese designation anywhere in the documents, capturing mentions in authors’ affiliations and acknowledgment sections. They measured impact by the number of publications per year and cumulative citations, applying simple and exponential linear models in R to test whether production had sustained a temporal increase. Text processing and analytics converted publication data into quantifiable collaboration networks, and a word cloud of keywords from papers published between 2015 and 2021 revealed the programme’s dominant research topics.

The results are striking. The productivity of PPG Biologia increased exponentially over its nearly 22 years of existence, rising from fewer than ten peer-reviewed publications per year in 1999 to over 300 publications per year by 2022. Citations per year followed a weaker but significant linear trend, reaching a maximum of 400 citations in a single year, while the accumulated number of citations grew exponentially from fewer than 50 to over 4,000 across two decades. Even in the face of severe budget cuts to Brazilian research following the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, productivity kept climbing, which the authors suggest reflects a genuinely resilient research programme.

Collaboration patterns reveal a programme with reach far beyond its home institution. Although most co-authored papers involved researchers from other Brazilian institutions, PPG Biologia also published with researchers from 34 other countries spanning at least four continents. The United States and Argentina led the list of international partners, followed by the United Kingdom, Chile, Spain and Germany. The reasons for international collaboration are numerous, the authors note, but often reflect a researcher’s reputation, access to research funds, and an increase in quality and multidisciplinarity brought by the expertise of collaborators. Many PPG Biologia researchers are renowned experts in their fields, and the programme’s groups included several research lines addressing globally relevant topics in genetics and evolution, taxonomy of highly diverse Neotropical groups, and the dynamics of ecosystems, communities and populations.

Keyword analysis of recent publications showed a predominance of studies dealing with animals, behaviour, ecosystems, biodiversity, genetics and populations, with the word Brazil itself highlighted prominently. The programme’s research lines spanned biological sciences, ecology, sociology, education, environmental sciences and genetics, but spread through a diverse range of topics. Among them were studies of human impact through pollution, agriculture, habitat fragmentation and climate change. Notably, the programme maintained research in taxonomy, currently one of the most neglected areas of biological knowledge in Brazil and worldwide, covering groups such as plants, fish, arachnids and flatworms. The programme had 13 fully equipped research laboratories led by highly qualified ecologists, zoologists, geneticists and microbiologists.

To place PPG Biologia’s performance in national context, the researchers downloaded data from 2013 to 2020 for all 389 Brazilian postgraduate programmes in Biological Sciences from the open data portal of CAPES, the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, which conducts annual evaluations of programme performance based on productivity and personnel formation. Using Wilcoxon tests to compare Unisinos with public and private institutions, the analysis found that PPG Biologia’s recent performance score of 5 was above the median performance of Brazilian private institutions and statistically similar to that of public ones. Brazilian biology programmes have a median classification of 4, and a mean of 4.5, making PPG Biologia’s score the highest realistic rating any active programme can achieve.

This achievement is all the more impressive given the structural disadvantages faced by private universities in Brazil. Although biodiversity research occurs in both public and private institutions, even private ones rely almost entirely on governmental funding, and private universities invest very little in research of their own. The overall scores of programmes in private universities are lower than those of public universities, likely explained by this dependence on public money. PPG Biologia kept its high-impact score despite a gradual dismissal of professors since 2016 and the ever-growing reduction of research funds, a fact the authors describe as remarkable in the face of the attacks the programme received through funding cuts and personnel reduction.

The broader political backdrop adds weight to the findings. Brazilian biodiversity science has suffered severe budget cuts in recent years, driven by politicians associated with the agribusiness sector, which controls a large proportion of the Brazilian Congress and pushes legislation to reduce environmental protection. The situation worsened during the Bolsonaro administration, when significant dismantling of environmental laws took place, leading to increased deforestation, especially in the Amazon Rainforest, and greater release of pesticides. Against this backdrop, the discontinuation of consolidated, high-prestige research programmes has become an additional threat to Brazilian research, as many institutions host groups working on unique and important research lines that cannot easily be replaced.

The authors also raise uncomfortable questions about Unisinos itself. The university is a Jesuit institution recognised by Brazilian education agencies as a non-profit entity interested in academic excellence and the promotion and development of education, maintained by civil society and expected to contribute to the country’s development through high-quality education. Yet, in addition to discontinuing twelve postgraduate programmes and dismissing about 40 professors at once, the institution started a controversial partnership with a large firearm company in 2021. Such attitudes, the authors argue, do not seem to agree with the principles Unisinos supposedly holds, and the decision to favour profit over research, education and nature conservation denied the programme’s promising future.

The consequences of the interruption extend well beyond one university’s balance sheet. With a team of renowned researchers working on different and sometimes unique research lines, the loss of PPG Biologia interrupts the research of many professors and graduate students and will likely have a noticeable negative impact on Brazilian biological research. The programme’s taxonomy work, already among the most neglected areas of biological knowledge, faces particular risk, as does the study of Neotropical ecosystems, communities and populations that underpins conservation across the region. The authors conclude that the programme showed a promising future as a promoter of knowledge and conservation of Neotropical ecosystems, and that its interruption will harm the progress of biological research and conservation across the Neotropical realm, a loss whose full dimensions may only become clear as the programme’s once-exponential publication record falls silent.

Subject of Research: Conservation biology and biodiversity research in Brazil

Article Title: Productivity and impact of the Unisinos’ Postgraduate Program in Biology and the consequences of its interruption for Brazilian science

Article References: Boll, P. K., & Krüger, L. (2023). Productivity and impact of the Unisinos’ Postgraduate Program in Biology and the consequences of its interruption for Brazilian science. Neotropical Biology and Conservation, 18(3), 119-129. https://doi.org/10.3897/neotropical.18.e103070

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/neotropical.18.e103070

Keywords: Brazil, Unisinos, PPG Biologia, bibliometrics, Neotropical, conservation, science funding, CAPES, Productivity, impact, Postgraduate, Program