Leadership Among the Leaders of The Brazilian Research Groups in Marine Biotechnology

Introduction The Marine Biotechnology (MB) research area is gaining increasing relevance in Brazil. Its analysis is a challenge owing to the inherently multidisciplinary nature, and the study of research groups (RGs) may support this work. The task of analysing RGs is facilitated in Brazil, which has a national source gathering the country's RGs, maintained by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico CNPq): the Directory of Research Groups of the Lattes Platform (Diretório dos Grupos de Pesquisa da Plataforma Lattes, http://lattes.cnpq.br/web/dgp), with information from RGs related to: i. institutional headquarters; ii. Research Group name; iii. First leader name, iv. Second leader name (if any), and v. Predominant area. This source allows automatic data extraction already made available by research groups, allowing for full and systematic exploitation. This work aims to present first findings from exploitation on research groups in MB existing in Brazil registered in the Directory of RGs of the Lattes Platform, checking the collaboration networks formed by the leaders of these groups, mainly highlighting the natural influence that leaders have on other peers, meaning a leadership, focusing on research groups through the topological properties of networks with the use of Social Network Analysis (Abbasia, Wigand & Hossain, 2014), in order to behold their evolution and the role of the RGs’ leaders in MB in Brazil and testing if it is possible to establish a relationship between the degree of leadership of the leaders considering topological information from networks.