Structure of the Researcher Network on Sustainability and Sustainable Development in the Brazilian Amazon

The work aims to analyze the structure of the network of researchers in sustainability and sustainable development in the Brazilian Amazon, formed between 2016 and 2020, based on studies of social networks and with a focus on research published in journals in the area of study of social sciences applied. As for the objective, the research is characterized as descriptive, as it seeks to present the structural properties of the researchers that form the network. The research method is classified as quantitative. The research corpus was formed by scientific articles published in these journals that focused on sustainability or sustainable development, made available in the Scopus (Elsevier), Web of Science (WoS) and Scielo databases. 352 items were found. The application of the exclusion criteria resulted in a sample of 115 articles. 459 authors were identified, belonging to 171 institutions, 100 foreign and 71 Brazilian, who had at least one publication of a scientific article. The Federal University of Para and the Instituto Tecnologico Vale stood out with the largest number of affiliated researchers. As for the results related to centrality measures, this network was characterized as homogeneous and through an average of the three measures analyzed, we can say that researcher Rachael D. Garrett is a collaborator of great importance for Brazilian Amazon studies. Evidence was identified that the construction of knowledge through social relationships for collaboration in research is in the phase of interaction in the network of researchers in the Brazilian Amazon, considering the isolated practices identified.