Development in the Knowledge Age: the evolution of BRICS participation in global scientific and technological production, from 1996 to 2010

This Policy Brief examines the evolution of BRICS relative participation in global scientific and technological production as an indicator of ongoing realignments in the global political economy. At the outset, this evolution is examined by the prism of the more conventional indicator of performance: the participation of authors from the BRICS countries, the United States, Western Europe and Japan in the publication of articles in international publications indexed between 1996 and 2010. Then, we examined the distribution of this production among the different areas of knowledge in the BRICS countries in order to verify the priority development lines of their respective national Science and Technology (S & T) systems.