Coherence in the thematic representation of scientific articles in the public health area

Abstract The research investigates the semantic coherence in the indexing of journal articles in the public health area, in Portuguese, indexed in the Scientific Production Repository of the National School of Public Health Sergio Arouca (ENSP) of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) aiming to contribute to the semantic interoperability between the repositories of this Foundation. For that, 10 papers from Brazilian scientific journals, published in open access between 2012-2014 and registered in the Scientific Production Repository of ENSP / Fiocruz, were analyzed. The articles were processed in the software RankWord and WordSmith 6.0, after applying the laws of Zipf and Goffman Transition Point to identify the terms of high semantic load of texts. The terms selected in each article were compared in the 5 (five) indicators used in the research: Goffman's T region; Expressions WordSmith 6.0, Keywords; DeCS (Descriptors in Health Sciences) and Title. The results were compiled using the discursive plane of sentences, with emphasis on terms used as foregrounding and in terms used as background, helping to verify the degree of coherence between the articles. The data collected reveal a low degree of semantic coherence in most articles studied. Thus, we suggest an investigation with an expanded sample to confirm the data obtained, especially when dealing with articles published in Portuguese in the area of health and its importance in brazilian scientific communication.