Productivity and impact of the Unisinos' Postgraduate Program in Biology and the consequences of its interruption for Brazilian science

15 On 22 July 2022, the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), a private institution 16 in southern Brazil, announced the interruption of 12 of its postgraduate programs, includin g 17 the Postgraduate Program of Biology (PPG Biologia), whose professors founded the journal 18 Neotropical Biology and Conservation. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of papers 19 published by PPG Biologia in the past 20 years to assess its impact on biological research at 20 a national level. The number of publications and citations increased constantly over the years, 21 with publications growing exponentially. Although most collaborations with other research 22 programs occurred inside Brazil, a significant number of studies were co -authored by 23 researchers from other countries from at least four continents. The main research lines 24 focused on biological sciences, ecology, sociology, education, environmental sciences, and 25 genetics. Despite being affected by the decrease in research funding and the reduction of 26 personnel, PPG Biologia kept its high impact score according to the national evaluation, above 27 that of most programs in private universities. With a team of renowned researchers working 28 on different and sometimes unique research lines, the interruption of PPG Biologia will harm 29 the progress of biological research and conservation across the Neotropical realm. 30 31

Bibliometric, Biodiversity Loss, Brazil, Environmental Crisis, Political Crisis, 32 Publications 33 34

35 36 In Brazil, Biodiversity research occurs in both public and private institutions, but, even in 37 private ones, it relies almost entirely on governmental funding (Mittermeier et al. 2005, 38 McManus and Baeta Neves 2021) , which has been on constant turmoil (Magnusson et al. 39 2018, Quintans-Júnior et al. 2020) . Biodiversity science suffered severe budget cuts by the 40 Brazilian government in the recent years, driven by politicians associated with the agribusiness 41 sector (Fearnside 2016, Magnusson et al. 2018). Agribusiness controls a large proportion of 42 the Brazilian Congress and pushes legislation to reduce environmental protection (Crouzeilles 43 et al. 2017), actively discrediting science through direct attacks on researchers, science denial 44 and misinformation (Hallal 2021) . The situation became even worse du ring Bolsonaro’s 45 administration, who have attacked and denied science himself (de Oliveira Andrade 2019, 46 Hallal 2021). 47 48 Author-formatted, not peer-reviewed document posted on 13/03/2023. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e103082 2 With the increasing precariousness of science funding in Brazil, the discontinuati on of 49 consolidated high-prestige research programs bec ame an additional threat to research (de 50 Oliveira Andrade 2019, Hallal 2021), as many institutions have groups working on unique and 51 important research lines. This is the case of the Postgraduate Program in Biology ( PPG 52 Biologia) of the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), located in São Leopo ldo, 53 southern Brazil. 54 55 On 22 July 2022, Unisinos announced the interruption of PPG Biologia and other 11 56 postgraduate programs. This decision, according to the institution, aims to promote the 57 University’s financial balance (Ferreira 2022) but is a serious attack on Brazilian research. 58 PPG Biologia was implemented in 2000 with a course for master’s degrees and, in 2006, 59 expanded to include doctoral degrees as well. Also in 2006, PPG Biologia launched the journal 60 Neotropical Biology and Conservation, which replaced the journal Acta Biologica 61 Leopoldensia, created in 1979 by professors of the Unisinos’ Biology course (Maltchik 2006). 62 The program had 13 fully equipped research laboratories led by highly qualified ecologists, 63 zoologists, geneticists, and microbiologists. Its discontinuation interrupted the research of 64 many professors and graduate students and will likely have a noticeable ne gative impact on 65 Brazilian biological research. 66 67 Measuring the importance of this postgraduate program can help us understand better the 68 consequences of its discontinuation. Thus, we herein conducted a bibliometric analysis of 69 papers published by PPG Biolo gia in the past 20 years to assess its impact on biolog y 70 research at a national level, evaluating production, collaborations and comparing overall 71 performance with other Brazilian institutions. 72 73

74 75 We ran a bibliographical review on the Dimensions platform ( https://app.dimensions.ai/). 76 Dimensions is the “world’s largest research information dataset” with over 130 million 77 publications registered, classified, and described on a standardized methodology (Bode et al. 78 2019). The term “ Programa Pós -graduação Biologia Unisinos” (Portuguese for “Unisinos 79 Postgraduate Program in Biology”) was searched anywhere in the documents, as it could be 80 mentioned in the authors' affiliations and acknowledgment sections. 81 82 We measured the impact of PPG Biologia by the number of publications per year and the 83 cumulative citations using the R packages ‘dimensionsR’ (Aria 2022) and ‘bibliometriX’ (Aria 84 and Cuccurullo 2023) . To test whether there has been a sustained temporal increase in 85 production, number of citations, and accumulated number of citations, we applied simple or 86 exponential linear models in R (R Core Team 2022). 87 88 Text processing and analytics were used to convert text data into quantification data, using 89 the R packages ‘tidytext’ (Robinson and Silge 2023) and ‘tm’ (Feinerer and Hornik 2023). That 90 procedure was applied to identify the collaboration of researchers from PPG Biologia with 91 researchers from other institutions based on nationality, and the research areas of the 92 publications. We used a circular network and a bipartite network to describe a network of 93 countries with co -authorship and co -authorships in different research areas, respectively, 94 using the R packages ‘ggraph’ (Pedersen 2022) and ‘bipartite’ (Dormann et al. 2022). A word 95 Author-formatted, not peer-reviewed document posted on 13/03/2023. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e103082 3 cloud (Lang & Chien 2022) was applied using the frequency of keywords from papers 96 published between 2015 and 2021 to identify the main topic of publications. 97 98 Postgraduate programs (PGs) in Brazil are classified by CAPES (Portuguese acronym for 99 Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel), which conducts annual 100 evaluations of the PGs’ performance based on their impac t, such as productivity and 101 personnel formation (Cross et al. 201 7). We downloaded data from 2013 to 2020 of all 102 Brazilian PGs in Biological Sciences (389 PGs for the period) from 103 https://dadosabertos.capes.gov.br/dataset/. We used two separate Wilcox tests to compare 104 the performance of Unisinos with public and private institutions. 105 106 Data and script provided in Krüger (2023). 107 108

109 110 The productivity of PPG Biologia (Fig. 1a) inc reased exponentially (adj. R 2 = 0.898, F 1,26 = 111 23.91, P < 0.001) from less than 10 peer -reviewed publications per year in 1999 to over 300 112 publications per year in 2022. Citations per year (Fig. 1b) increased on a weak but significant 113 linear trend (adj. R2 = 0.233, F1,26 = 7.90, P = 0.009), reaching a maximum of 400 citations in 114 one year. The accumulated number of citations (Fig. 1c) increased exponentially from less 115 than 50 to over 4,000 in 20 years (adj. R2 = 0.901, F1,26 = 24.69, P < 0.001). 116 117 118 119 Author-formatted, not peer-reviewed document posted on 13/03/2023. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e103082 4 Figure 1. Number of publications mentioning “ Programa Pós-graduação Biologia Unisinos ” 120 (a), number of citations per year of those same papers (b); and accumulated citations (c) of 121 those papers between 2000 and 2021. 122 123 PPG Biologia published papers mostly wi th authors from other Brazilian institutions but also 124 with authors from other 34 countries. USA and Argentina were the countries with the largest 125 numbers of papers co-authored with Unisinos researchers after Brazil, followed by the United 126 Kingdom, Chile, S pain, and Germany (Fig 2). Most frequent publications predominated in 127 research lines of biological sciences, ecology, sociology, education, environmental sciences, 128 and genetics but were spread through a diverse range of lines (Fig. 2b). 129 130 131 132 133 Figure 2. Netw ork of the nationality of coauthors’ institutions for papers published by 134 researchers from the Unisinos Postgraduate Program in Biology between 2015 and 2021, 135 including only countries with more than two publications (a) and a bipartite network connecting 136 the nationality of the authors’ institutions with the publications’ research lines, including only 137 research lines with at least two publications (b). Line width in both ‘a’ and ‘b’ represents 138 frequency; bar height in ‘b’ indicates the frequency of countries (left) and research lines (right). 139 140

analysis (Fig. 3) revealed a predominance of studies dealing with animals, behavior, 141 ecosystems, biodiversity, genetics, and populations; other less frequent words showed a wide 142 range of studied topics. The keyword “Brazil” was also highlighted; “south” and “America” also 143 appeared but with a lower frequency. 144 145 Author-formatted, not peer-reviewed document posted on 13/03/2023. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e103082 5 146 Figure 3. Wordcloud highlighting the most frequent keywords mentioned by publications from 147 the Unisinos Postgraduate Program in Biology between 2015 and 2021. 148 149 150 Biology PGs in Brazil have a median performance classification (lower 5%, upper 95%) of 4 151 (3,7) and a mean performance of 4.5 ± 0.25 (SE). The recent performance of Unisinos’ PPG 152 Biologia was 5, above the median performance of Brazilian private institutions (W = 258, P = 153 0.006) and similar to the public institutions (W = 775.5, P = 0.558) (Fig. 4). 154 155 Author-formatted, not peer-reviewed document posted on 13/03/2023. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e103082 6 156 Figure 4. Freq uency distribution of national rank classification for Brazil’s Postgraduate 157 Programs in Biological Sciences classified as public (blue) and private (red) administration 158 between 2015 and 2020 in relation to the current classification of Unisinos’ Postgradu ate 159 Program in Biology. 160 161 162

163 164 During its almost 22 years of existence, PPG Biologia showed an exponential increase in 165 productivity. Even in the face of the severe budget cuts in Brazilian research following the 166 impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 167 (Quintans-Júnior et al. 2020), the productivity kept growing, which suggests that PPG Biologia 168 was a resilient research program. The number of citations showed a smaller increase across 169 the years, but the overall trend may result from a considerable reduction in citations in the last 170 few years. If one considers true that the number of citations determines the quality of research, 171 which is a controversial topic (Caon et al. 2020) , this may be the metric that reflects the 172 consequences of both budget cuts from funding agencies and the gradual reduction in the 173 number of researchers in PPG Biologia, which started with the gradual dismissal of professors 174 since 2016 (personal observation). As a result, although the number of publications continued 175 to increase, the research areas covered likely decreased, thus reducing the research fields 176 that would find relevant studies among the most recent productions of PPG Biologia. 177 178 Although PPG Biologia conducted most studies with other Brazilian researchers, 179 collaborations with researchers in other countries from at least four continents and covering a 180 Author-formatted, not peer-reviewed document posted on 13/03/2023. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e103082 7 diversity of research lines also stood out. The reasons for internati onal collaborations in 181 research are numerous but often motivated by the researcher's reputation, access to research 182 funds, and an increase in quality and multidisciplinarity due to the expertise of collaborators 183 (Dusdal and Powell 2021). Many researchers of PPG Biologia are renowned experts in their 184 fields, and the research groups of PPG Biologia included s everal research lines addressing 185 globally relevant topics related to genetics and evolution (Silva et al. 2021, Allgayer et al. 186 2022), taxonomy of highly diverse Neotropical groups (Rodrigues et al. 2020, 2021, Hellmann 187 et al. 2022, Marques et al. 2022, Reis and Lehmann A. 2022) , as well as the dynamics of 188 ecosystems, communities, and populations (Boll and Leal-Zanchet 2018, Fontoura et al. 2019, 189 MOSER et al. 2022), including the study of human impact through pollution (Dalzochio et al. 190 2018, Finger et al. 2021, Bauer et al. 2022) , agriculture (Meneghel et al. 2022) , habitat 191 fragmentation (Baldissera et al. 2020, Dalmolin et al. 2023), and climate change (Fontana et 192 al. 2018, Krüger et al. 2018, Epele et al. 2022). One can notice this diversity in research lines 193 through the most frequent keywords in recent publications. 194 195 CAPES score to evaluate Brazilian Postgraduate Programs ranges between 1 and 7, with 6 196 and 7 indicating excellence (and achiev ed by very few programs) and 1 and 2 meaning that 197 the program is discredited. Thus, the most realistic score for any active postgraduate program 198 varies from 3 to 5. Although this evaluation system is often questioned and has its flaws 199 (Barata 2019), it is impressive that PPG Biologia was able to keep the highest realistic score 200 in the face of the ever-growing attacks that it received through the reduction of research funds 201 and the gradual decrease i n the number of researchers. This is even more impressive 202 considering that PPG Biologia was part of a private university, Unisinos, and the overall scores 203 of programs in private universities are lower than those of public universities. This difference 204 in s core between public and private institutions is likely explained by the fact that private 205 universities invest very little in research and rely almost exclusively on public funding 206 (McManus and Baeta Neves 2021). 207 208 Unisinos is a Jesuit university and is said to be a non -profit entity interested in academic 209 excellence and the promotion and development of education 210 (https://www.unisinos.br/institucional). However, not only did it discontinue 12 postgradua te 211 programs and dismissed about 40 professors at once, but started a partnership with a large 212 firearm company in 2021 (Rede Brasil Atual 2022). Such attitudes do not seem to agree with 213 the principles that Unisinos supposedly holds. 214 215

216 217 Despite the constant attacks through budget cuts and reduction of personnel, PPG Biologia 218 was able to keep its high -quality score over the years. With a research team including 219 renowned researchers and encompassing a diversity of relevant research lines, it showed a 220 promising future as a promoter of knowledge and conservation of Neotropical ecosystems. 221 Unfortunately, this future was denied by the sudden decision of an allegedly non -profit 222 institution to favor profit over research, education, and nature conservation. 223 224 225

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