About this website
Researching Brazil/Pesquisa no Brasil is an open-access subject portal focusing on Brazilian Studies. Freely available, the online resource provides organized access to scholarly content (directories of researchers, digitized collections, reference works) and a fully searchable subject bibliography consisting of over 3,000 articles drawn from 143 history and social science academic journals published in Brazil. Originally launched in 2000 as my postdoctoral fellowship project during my training as Latin American Studies librarian at Duke University, Researching Brazil has grown over the years and is today an internationally recognized information resource in the field of Brazilian Studies.
Designed to assist the research process, specifically discovery, the Bibliographic Index is the portal’s core, innovative component and is necessarily selective and focused. Of the broad variety of articles published in any given issue of a Brazilian journal, I select only those references that meet these criteria: literature review articles, works on conceptual or theoretical debates, articles describing library or archival collections, works on research methodologies, and interviews with leading contemporary Brazilian and international scholars. Coverage in the index goes back to the mid-1980s for selected core titles, such as Dados: revista de ciências sociais, Revista brasileira de história, and Boletim informativo e bibliográfico de ciências sociais: BIB. In addition, besides full-text access, each article is described with keywords (or indexed) in Portuguese and English.
I have always taken direct responsibility for curating and actively maintaining the content available on the portal, from selecting websites to updating the news section regularly to managing the bibliography. I personally select and describe the journal articles in two languages (indexing), and enter the references into Zotero, the software used to manage the online bibliography. To keep the portal technologically current for such an extensive project, I have leveraged short-term collaborations with library science students and campus colleagues, significant among whom IU alumnus Timothy Thompson, currently Discovery Metadata Librarian at Yale University Library, was instrumental in a major redesign of the portal undertaken in 2012. Since 2019, Dr. Juan Manuel Soto Arriví, Senior Lecturer and Director of Instructional Technology in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, has provided key technological expertise to the project.
Luis A. González, Ph.D.
Herman B Wells Library
Indiana University
