Perpectives and challenges of the triennium 2010-2012 for the postgraduate programs of the area 21 by CAPES.

In recent years, Brazil had one of the fastest rates of growth in scientific production and currently holds the 13 th position in the international ranking in the number of published articles (PNPG, 2011). In addition, the human resources have experienced a significant increase. This growth is determined by many factors, which involve from increment of resources to factors related to the national policies of induction. In this context, it is unequivocal the role of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brasília, DF, Brazil) in the expansion and consolidation of the stricto sensu postgraduate system. The assessment system has been used as a tool for the community in order to search for academic excellence. Its results have been used for the formulation of policies for the postgraduate area as well as for the dimensioning of the actions of financial supports, such as grants, scholarships, fellowships, etc. The act of assessing is not an easy task, and the intricate complexity of the factors considered by the assessment system proposed by CAPES (i.e., laboratories, libraries, employment status, intellectual production, social inclusion of the programme etc) makes this task even more difficult. Over the years and with a better understanding of these factors, many postgraduate programs have established their own strategies in order to align their activities with the evaluation parameters and these programs were able to achieve better scores. This fact has occurred especially with regards to the intellectual production, which has greater weight and is quite decisive in the assignment of the score. However, this process conferred to the postgraduate evaluation a negative aspect when it led some postgraduate programs to leave their characteristics and vocations behind de scenes, making the assessment one of their main goals. This fact diverts the purpose of inducing a natural growth in these postgraduate areas. An example of this fact is the deception used by some programs to insert highly productive researchers from other areas of knowledge that have little or no relationship to the area or research lines of the postgraduate program. If, on one hand, this strategy had shown to be positive in quantitative aspects and allowed the postgraduate program to obtain a higher score on the evaluation system, on the other hand, it produced a series of side effects. One of these side effects occurred by the incorporation of a considerable number of journals with low identity with the field of knowledge of the area, which led to the doubling of the median value of the main indexer (Journal Citation Reports-JCR) in the interstice of a triennium evaluation. The increase of the JCR median cannot be exclusively attributed to this factor, because the need of the academics to search for more funding (such as grants, scholarships etc.) has led our researchers to publish in journals with better indexing (i.e., with higher impact factors). This has generally occurred in all areas of knowledge. However, the basic and experimental sciences journals have notoriously better indexes (which reflect the magnitude of the area) and started to occupy the upper strata of the Qualis (A1 and A2). Hence, journals that have a more applied scope, as well as the ones that have scope in the social and humanities sciences moved to the lower strata of the Qualis. In order to the area can be considered as “productive”, it is not enough that their researchers publish in journals that are well indexed (generally of greatest impact factors), but that such publications keep close relationship with their