Práticas de letramentos com escrita científica em artigos de impacto na área de ciências da vida e biomedicina

Abstract

In the current context of higher education assessment, self-citation, conceived as a movement in which researchers cite their previous work in a work in progress, is a practice that has gained prominence in different areas of knowledge, with emphasis on the field of Life Sciences and Biomedicine. This article, therefore, aims to discuss uses of self-citation in high-impact articles in that field, published in the journal Nature, in 2017 and 2018. The focus on the five selected articles, from the Web of Science database, is qualitative, essentially under the focus of the Literacy Studies, which understand scientific writing as a social practice, conditioned to the socio-historical context of production, ideologies and permeated by power relations. The results seem to indicate a pattern of the field, with high self-citation rates distributed among the sections of the article. This pattern seems to represent characteristic shifts of scientific writing, such as contribution to the field, claiming credit for the researcher's work, indicating interaction with previous research, more than a practice that would contribute to raising the bibliometric indexes of researchers.