À The search for gender and sexuality

thoughts on the indexing of academic productions in Brazilian public universities

Abstract

This research aimed to understand the quality level of descriptors used in indexing documents related to academic production on Gender and Sexuality. The general objective was to investigate the indexing of academic production on Gender and Sexuality in digital repositories of Brazilian Higher Education Institutions, identifying this production in repositories from all regions of Brazil, mapping the descriptors used to index the documents deposited in the repositories, and evaluating the quality of the indexing descriptors and their recoverability in internet search engines. To this end, the research was carried out as exploratory, using a comparative and qualitative approach, and employed the content analysis method. Operationally, the selected institutions and repositories were as follows: North Region: Institutional Repository of the Federal University of Amazonas; Northeast Region: Institutional Repository of the Federal University of Bahia; Central-West Region: Institutional Repository of the University of Brasília; South Region: Digital Repository of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul; Southeast Region: Repository of Production from the University of São Paulo. The results indicated that academic production on Gender and Sexuality in the selected repositories is still insufficient, and the systems present indexing flaws, which can hinder the retrieval of works, limiting the search and filtering based on descriptive terms. It is hoped, therefore, that this investigation will contribute to increasing the visibility of works addressing the themes of Gender and Sexuality within the scientific community.