The relationships and influences of social epistemology in Brazil: a bibliometric analysis

Introduction: It presents a study on the scientific production regarding the social epistemology in Brazil through a bibliometric analysis using relationship indicators of citation and co-citation of authors. It also analyzes the main influences of this theme in the national scientific literature of social epistemology. Methods: A search was carried in the following databases using the term social epistemology: Scopus, Web of Science, SciELO and BRAPCI, aiming to find papers produced in Brazil, which resulted in 24 documents and a total of 516 cited authors. The next step was to apply Price's elitism law to highlight the most cited authors and creating a list of 22 authors. Results: The results have shown that the most cited authors were Jesse Shera, Luciano Floridi and Steve Fuller, all foreigners. As for the most cited Brazilian researcher among all the others, we can find Zandonade, also one of the most co-cited authors alongside Shera, Hjorland and Egan. Conclusions: The conclusions show that the national scientific literature on social epistemology still lacks a large production and has the Brazilian researcher Zandonade as one of its main influences as well as its founders Egan and Shera, its critic Floridi and the other theorists that form the scientific identity of this field: Fuller, Goldman, Hjorland and Budd.