We discuss social capital within the scope of the Brazilian Consortium for Research and Development of Coffee. The goal is to test the hypothesis that researchers' social capital may be taken as a variable for the resources of the consortium that these researchers were able to secure in their research projects. It was necessary to develop a social capital metric, apply it, and verify the correlation between the volume of captured resources and the volume of social capital. The application of the network analysis in view of the researchers' preferential choice and the quantification of the participation of these scientists in projects of the consortium enabled an estimation of a magnitude - the social capital - which could explain half the amount of variation obtained by each of the scientists responsible for research projects in the network.
Social capital; collaborative network; research consortium; social network analysis; coffee research
