The development and interweaving between bibliography, bibliometrics and politics in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to study the course and the current state of bibliographic studies in Brazil, based on the proposition that the nature of the bibliography, which characterizes it in a disciplinary and critical sense, is not limited to being an enumeration of documents or to serve as a schema of their reality in the system, but must also serve as a map to be consulted in relation to them. For this, it was necessary to reconstitute the historical context that allows the understanding of the relationship between national policies and information policies throughout the twentieth century. In this way, we have discovered that the investment choices that focused almost exclusively on scientifictechnological research have made bibliometrics the privileged form of study and bibliographic application in the country until at least the first years of the 21st century. In this research, carried out by the historical inquiry of the sources, some of the great protagonists of the processes of implantation of the bibliographical and bibliometric methodologies, such as Lydia Sambaquy and Edson Nery da Fonseca, were found and treated. Our hypothesis is that, since the Estado Novo era, there has been an evident and explicit interweaving between national policies aimed at scientific visions of modernization and information policies.