Resumo

The concept of Geographical Indications (GIs) was conceived centuries ago, in a world where different peoples have found the need to tie certain products to certain places, so they could label their reputational quality, traditions and know-how. In Brazil, however, this history is more recent. Only regulated through Law 9,279 of 14th May 1996, the country is in a process of learning and development, applied to various regions, organizations, and products in the country. By analyzing this advance of knowledge, our research presents an overview of studies about Brazilian GIs, from 1996 to 2020.

In a global market with increasingly fierce competition, geographical indications emerge in many countries as means to promote self-sustainable products, with unique characteristics, from historical, cultural, and environmentally friendly origins. Hence, it seems relevant to understand the scientific progress about Brazilian GIs over time. No study has considered mapping the scientific production on the theme throughout the country. So, the objective of this paper is to map the publications on the scientific milieu, helping identify possible scientific needs, and shed light on future studies.

GIs can be used as strategies to drive local development by adding value to products, highlighting characteristics and attributes that make them unique, especially in the case of agri-food (Pellin & Vieira, 2015). The transformative capacity in producing communities can stimulate the dynamism of tourism, agriculture, sustainability, articulating competitiveness for better market conditions (Artêncio et. al., 2019; Valente et al., 2012; Bowen, 2010). Data from INPI (2020) evidences a concentration of GIs in Brazil, raising questions about the distribution of studies throughout the country.

We have adopted a systematic approach for literature review proposed by Pagani et al. (2015). In a nutshell, Methodi Ordinatio is a 9-step methodology for searching, selecting, and organizing scientific studies, based on three criteria: impact factor, year of publication and number of citations. As for search engine, Scopus was chosen for being an omnibus database, used more than 5,000 academic, government and corporate institutions as an unquestionable source of scientific works. Besides, this database has already been adopted in other review papers about geographical indications in Brazil.

Our findings reveal that the studies are mostly published in Brazilian journals (308 papers). There is a super abundance of studies in two GIs from the northeast region of the country: Vale do Submédio São Francisco (134 papers) and Mossoró (67 papers). There are 84 studies (from different geographical indications) that presented negative values for the InOrdinatio equation. Most studies are contained in the area of Natural Sciences, more necessarily in the categories of Agronomy and Crop Science, Food Science, Plant Science, Soil Science, and Agricultural and Biological Science.

The apparent implication is that there has been a growing interest from Brazilian researchers on the topic, although there still is a considerable number of regions that have not been directly studied. The main contribution of this paper, however, is the verification of a virtual absence of a central term as means to accommodate this extensive sample of studies in a common body of knowledge about geographical indications. We therefore suggest that authors poring over these products and regions consider including the term “geographical indication” either in the title, abstract or keywords.

Artêncio, M.M., Giraldi, J.M.E., Galina, S.V.R. (2019). Uma Análise Crítica do Papel e Importância Socioeconômica das Indicações Geográficas em Países em Desenvolvimento. Castro, V. A. & Giraldi, J. M. E. (2018). Estratégias de marcas para setores brasileiros: diferenças conceituais entre indicação geográfica, marca coletiva e setorial. Pagani, R.N., Kovaleski, J.L., & Resende, L.M. (2015). Methodi Ordinatio: a proposed methodology to select and rank relevant scientific papers encompassing the impact factor, number of citation, and year of publication.