Passou mais um ano e a U.Porto e a U.Nova continuam reféns da mesma incapacidade

 

https://pachecotorgal.com/2025/08/01/engenharia-civil-em-portugal-os-20-livros-indexados-mais-citados-de-sempre/

Na sequência do post publicado há um ano, acessível no link acima, sobre os 20 (vinte) livros indexados na plataforma Scopus, mais citados de sempre, na área da Engenharia Civil, apresenta-se abaixo a lista atualizada, ordenada pelo número de citações. 

O destaque continua a pertencer, à UMinho, que volta a afirmar o seu domínio inequívoco, com 12 títulos. Seguem-se o LNEC e a ULisboa, com 3 títulos cada, e a UCoimbra, com 2.

Em contrapartida, é surpreendente constatar que a UPorto e a UNova continuam totalmente ausentes desta lista, revelando uma persistente incapacidade. Este facto significa que a competição que foi mencionada aqui https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2025/12/universidades-e-politecnicos-conseguem.html muito pouco deve ao contributo dos investigadores da área da Engenharia Civil da UPorto e da UNova, cuja ausência nesta lista é tão persistente quanto objetivamente difícil de justificar.

1º - Handbook of Alkali-Activated Cements, Mortars and Concretes    

2º - Handbook of Recycled Concrete and Demolition Waste    
3º - Design of Steel Structures   
4º - Eco-Efficient Concrete              

5º - Toxicity of building materials  
6º - Mechanics and strength of materials   

8º - Fibrous and composite Materials for civil engineering applications 

9º - Performance indicators for water supply services                 
10º - Seismic Design of Concrete Buildings to Eurocode 8       

11º - Nano and biotech based materials for energy building Efficiency 

12º - Historic Construction and Conservation Materials, Systems and Damage

13º - Sustainable Construction Materials: Copper Slag               

14º - Infrastructure public-private partnerships                     

15º - Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering          
16º - Cost-Effective Energy Efficient Building Retrofitting                 
17º - Advances in Construction and Demolition Waste Recycling
18º - Eco-efficient Repair and Rehabilitation of Concrete Infrastructures 

19º - Design Solutions and Innovations in Temporary Structures            

20º - New trends in eco-efficient and recycled concrete                          

A U.Porto conseguiu colocar um artigo no Top 0.5% dos artigos mais citados. A U.Coimbra e a U.Nova continuam a zero

 

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2025/05/uma-analise-expedita-sobre-o-desempenho.html

Há mais de um ano atrás, no dia 1 de Maio de 2025, divulguei o desempenho dos investigadores Portugueses em termos do número de artigos no grupo Top 0.5% mais citados de uma conhecida revista científica da Elsevier na área da engenharia civil, grupo esse que era dominado pela universidade do Minho. Vide post acessível no link supra. 

Quando agora, um ano depois, se procede a uma nova pesquisa na plataforma Scopus, para se conseguir saber quantos artigos é que Portugal ainda tem no grupo Top 0.5% da referida revista, constata-se que as mudanças foram mínimas, e a UMinho ainda continua a ter o domínio absoluto dessa lista, de forma inequívoca. No que respeita às mudanças, um dos artigos de um catedrático da univ. de Lisboa saiu dessa lista, tendo sido substituído por um artigo de uma professora associada, entretanto aposentada, Joana Sousa-Coutinho, da universidade do Porto. Isso significa que infelizmente os investigadores da UCoimbra e da UNova ainda não conseguiram colocar nenhum artigo no referido grupo do Top 0.5%. 

PS - Ainda sobre citações vale a pena recordar o que escreveu a catedrática Lauren M McIntyre, editora-chefe da revista científica Genes, Genomes, Genetics "as citações são a forma como reconhecemos aqueles que fazem parte da comunidade científica mundial". 

The Battle for the World's Brightest Minds

Four days ago, in the postscript to a post on China's ambition to build a new global scientific order, I wrote: "Beijing may well engineer scientific supremacy. But the kind of genius that produces Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs unruly, contrarian, and often indifferent to national priorities may prove far harder to engineer." It appears that Beijing understands this challenge perfectly well. If Nobel-winning genius cannot easily be engineered, the next best strategy is to recruit it. Omar Yaghi, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of metal-organic frameworks, has left the University of California, Berkeley, to join Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he will lead a new institute using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of advanced materials. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02143-x

The significance of this move is difficult to overstate. This is not a mid-career researcher seeking a better salary, nor a retired academic accepting an honorary appointment. It is a newly crowned Nobel laureate, at the height of his scientific influence, choosing Beijing over Berkeley in one of the most strategically important scientific fields of the coming industrial revolution. Nor is Yaghi an isolated case. The South China Morning Post has recently documented a growing list of scientists leaving leading institutions in the United States and Britain for China during 2026 alone, including senior academics, computer vision specialists, and semiconductor experts. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3359883/10-scientists-and-experts-who-have-left-us-and-uk-china-so-far-2026

Many cite shrinking research budgets and diminishing opportunities to pursue ambitious, long-term research in the West. In an era defined by the battle for the world's brightest minds, such conditions amount to unilateral disarmament. They are the logical outcome of a persistent tendency to undervalue scientific talent, a theme I explored in February, responding to a Nature article by Harvard-affiliated authors who argued that exceptionally high salaries for elite researchers are detrimental to science. My conclusion was the opposite: underpaying outstanding scientists poses a far greater threat to scientific progress, particularly at a moment when exceptional talent has become one of the world's most valuable strategic resources. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/02/in-defense-of-high-salaries-paying-for.html

None of this should surprise regular readers of my blog. In May 2025 more than a year before Yaghi's move I highlighted The Economist's reporting on China's systematic campaign to recruit leading Western scientists. I also recalled that a Chinese university had already recruited a Nobel Prize-winning French physicist and noted the revelation by the 2021 Nobel laureate Ardem Patapoutian that China had offered him a 20-year research endowment. Twenty years of guaranteed funding is a planning horizon that Western funding agencies, constrained by short grant cycles and an ever-expanding evaluation bureaucracy, are scarcely capable of imagining. What Patapoutian declined, Yaghi has now accepted. The recruitment strategy that was already visible in 2025 has secured one of the world's most influential chemists. https://pachecotorgal.com/2025/05/25/science-the-persistent-disruption-metric-nobel-minds-and-chinas-long-game/

The deeper irony is that American scientific leadership was never built solely on American-born scientific talent either. According to the New York Times, roughly 40% of the Nobel Prizes awarded this century to U.S.-based scientists in physics, chemistry, and medicine have gone to researchers born abroad. America's greatest scientific advantage was its unparalleled ability to attract the world's brightest minds. Beijing is now trying to reproduce that model while Washington appears increasingly willing to undermine it. 

PS - Europe's predicament is different from America's and arguably more serious. Washington is weakening a scientific ecosystem that once attracted the world's brightest minds; Europe never succeeded in building one with comparable global pulling power. Recent bibliometric evidence suggests this is not merely a matter of perception. Rodríguez-Navarro (2026) argues that the EU is caught in a "normal research trap", producing an abundance of solid science while lagging far behind both the United States and China in the breakthrough research that underpins disruptive innovation. In this entire story, a newly crowned Nobel laureate courted, recruited, and placed at the head of a lavishly funded AI institute, Europe barely appears except as a supplier of talent: the Nobel Prize-winning physicist recruited by a Chinese university in 2024 was, after all, French. As I noted last year, when the Bruegel think tank highlighted Europe's shortcomings in frontier technologies, a continent that repeatedly educates outstanding scientists only to watch them build their greatest achievements elsewhere risks drifting into scientific irrelevance.