A Revisão por pares sob uma perspectiva sociológica e sistêmico-funcional: que indícios um estudo de caso na área de Letras nos revela sobre a produção e negociação de significados na ciência?

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates, through a case study of an exploratory and qualitative nature, peer review as an ill-defined problem by accessing the "voices" of the agents involved in the process. Specifically, it elicits sociological and linguistic aspects that intertwine: 1) the editor's voice in relation to editorial processes, focusing on peer review processes, through an unstructured interview; 2) the voices of some reviewers through analysis of their reviews, controlled changes or comments in the body of the text or speech bubbles of the text editor, adopting the Atlas.ti software as a tool for initial data exploration and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and the Appraisal System (AS) as the theoretical foundation of the analyses; and 3) the voice of some authors through analysis of the content of their responses to the reviews and transformations in the manuscript to meet or not the demands of the reviewers. In methodological terms, the case study comprises the manuscripts and respective reviews from volume 38 of the journal Letras & Letras (L&L) whose authors provided free and informed consent: three academic articles, A with three reviews, B with two reviews, and C with one review. The content of these manuscripts and their respective reviews was preliminarily explored through a content analysis (Bardin, 2016) performed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) using the Atlas.ti tool, and then manually investigated based on categories derived from the SA. This study reveals that it is a hidden process, with ill-defined dimensions, in which, often, the observations and explanations are not always clear enough about what should be corrected in the text. Overall, it was not possible to identify a relationship of complementarity/convergence between the reviews provided for the same manuscript. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the spatio-temporal limitations of this selection and the lack of diversity of journals. Based on this research, it is hoped to continue the search for more current and comprehensive clarifications regarding the problem of text revision/editorial review and in-depth elucidations in relation to scientific practices and the processes of scientific production. The publication of articles does not represent the closing of a cycle, but the beginning of a virtuous circle that plays a crucial role in our society: the democratization of knowledge.