BETWEEN CENTERS AND MARGINS
SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION ON HEALTH IN THE AMAZON
Keywords:
information and health, Brazilian Amazon, regional inequalities, scientific production, information metric studiesAbstract
Scientific production in Information and Health within Brazilian Information Science reflects institutional and territorial dynamics that highlight historical disparities among the country's regions. This study analyzes the presence of the Northern Region and the Brazilian Amazon in the scientific production on Information and Health presented at the National Meeting of Research in Information Science between 1994 and 2024, identifying its institutional and regional distribution. The research is characterized as qualitative-quantitative, exploratory, and descriptive, employing bibliometric procedures and content analysis as methodological strategies. The corpus initially retrieved consisted of 286 works published in the event proceedings related to the Information and Health theme, of which 283 composed the corpus after applying the selection criteria — 220 of them published in WG 11 — and seven presented themes or institutional affiliations related to the Northern Region or the Legal Amazon: six with an affiliation in the Legal Amazon and one identified solely by theme. The results indicate an institutional concentration in Southeast Brazil within institutions with a tradition in the field, and that none of these works addressed the Brazilian Amazon as a central research object. The findings highlight the limited presence of the Northern Region in Information and Health studies, demonstrating territorial asymmetries in knowledge production, and pointing to significant gaps and research agendas to be explored by Brazilian Information Science.