EDITORIAL
Is research necessary? To evaluate is not...(a)
Emiko Yoshikawa Egry
Full Professor at the Collective Nursing Department at the School of Nursing, University of São Paulo. Member of the CNPq Nursing Assistance Committee (Dec. 2007 to Nov. 2009). Associate editor of the Revista da Escola de Enfermagem da USP. São Paulo, SP, Brazil. emiyegry@usp.br
When the year 2009 began, I was honored with a gift from a friend - a magnificent book by Ítalo Calvino(1): Why read the classics. The author, early in the book, makes us reflect about reading and rereading. The first pages make us understand that the classics are the books that comprise a wealth for those who read and loved them; but not less of a wealth for the fortunate ones that read them for the first time and in the very best conditions to develop an appreciation(1). The classics help understand who we are and where we are and for that reason the Brazilian classics are important, in fact, indispensable to be compared against the foreign classics, and the foreign classics are indispensable to be compared against the Brazilian(1) (in the original text, the word Brazilian is actually Italian, due to the place where Calvino speaks from).
But one may wonder what this has to do with our activities of researching and evaluating what is researched and the ones researching? Quite a lot, I would wager. So much it would not fit in one editorial alone.
Nursing research, as in other areas of expertise, helps to find answers to why a particular phenomenon occurs. Curiosity is its strong ally, ass well as the desire to perform better and, to do this, understanding what and how is the target phenomenic object of the investigation. The results can be new ways to intervene in health care (itself or its management) or in the health-disease process, including the diagnosis, planning, management, implementation and evaluation. Research, therefore, is necessary and the most important aspect of this need is the reflection about that which is observed, discovered or learned. Reflection is the act of rereading the reality in the new form it presents itself. Analogous to what Calvino referred about the classic world literature, rereading the reality as it once appeared and the way it appears in the present is a fabulous experience for researchers at a mature age, since it permits appreciating the several levels and the various meanings.
Research does not have a precise nature because, just like living, the beginning may be recognized, but little is known about where it will end... and for many researchers, that is exactly the charm of researching ... its non foreseeable end. Nursing, as an area with the essential characteristics of Humanities - since it addresses life and death, health and disease, suffering, happiness, accomplishments, taking care and caring for, work and the work process, meaning and interpretations, and the context, conjecture and structure of society - has particular phenomena to be investigated and, as opposed to what many admit or desire, the forms of disseminating the findings not always fit in pre-established contemporary models of the so-called health sciences.
Evaluation is not precise. This is much less due to the tools used by those who regulate scientific literature in Brazil than the intention behind evaluations. The exact lack of clarity of that intention makes evaluation a pitiful process for those evaluating and those being evaluated: what do we want to evaluate? Why do we want to evaluate? There is incoherence between a supposed desire - to improve production and value more meaningful products, for instance - and the ranking criteria used, in which percentages are randomly determined, clearly benefiting areas with a larger number of journals, with detriment to ours, for example, it causes a disorientation of the general meaning of scientific and cultural production of the country. This also occurs when the evaluation results are used to decide about financial resource contributions and the number of scholarships to be offered: here, there is also a lack of clarity and explicitness of the quantitative and qualitative evaluation criteria of research grants in several areas of expertise. The simple mention of distribution criteria to augment productivity grants or to increase the CNPq 1A charts (highest level researchers of the National Research Council) is considered a taboo among its evaluation processes.
Nevertheless, to evaluate is necessary because, certainly, the scientific production that takes up much of the country's public resources owes society a response, in terms of health and education. Scientific publications are one way to respond to society. Such publications should be written in a language that is comprehensible to professionals in that area, i.e. Portuguese for us, and it should be the researcher's first duty. After that, or perhaps simultaneously, the study should be published in the languages most known by researchers across the world, regardless of the journal's nationality, Brazilian or foreign. In Nursing, therefore, the second language could be English, Spanish, French, among others. This should all be made available in a truly Brazilian journal, why not? And each version should be computed in terms of evaluating research productivity, for anyone who has had this experience knows that each language demands a different culture to be used in the scientific publication.
If it is necessary to evaluate, then general and explicit internationality should rely on strategies and methods that are at the same time general and specific, and whose criteria should portray the conjecture and structure of each are of expertise, including strengths and weaknesses to be overcome.
The current CNPq researcher evaluation criteria and the CAPES graduate program criteria, despite the welcomed review invitation by the CNPq president this very month, need a broad review of their intention, which should be performed collectively, with the researchers' participation and reflection, in addition to a broad publication. It is impossible to perform this task in weeks, as impossible (and unfair) as would it be to implement the new criteria in a retroactive manner. In this way, the law should prevail in this case: to retroact only in cases that would benefit Nursing (and each of the other areas) and the researchers.
Therefore, there is obviously something to change: one of the most significant changes is to provide the investigation process and the results with a more cumulative character. Hence, the production of recent scientific publications (of the previous five years, which has been adopted) cannot annul the anterior publications, since it is responsible for researchers and research itself gaining the maturity of rereading the Nursing classics: the work (books, chapters, editorials, articles) that is unique and will always be an invitation for reflection for all nursing professionals. Researchers gain maturity according to their professional experience, adding reflexive mottos that may boost knowledge through intertextual reading and empirical findings. The cumulative character is always associated to that of multiple participation, i.e. the collective character. Hence, one should also value collective reflection; the process in which researchers truly look into the findings, turn to the texts once again, make provisional syntheses that are later debated by other researchers until finding the most fertile means for antithesis and synthesis. A process that yields a fabulous result, whose project has everything to become a classic, but requires time: and time does not fit the current criteria.
REFERENCE
- 1. Calvino I. Por que ler os clássicos. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras; 2007.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
09 Apr 2009 -
Date of issue
Mar 2009
