Visions of Science: Research at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon seen through its Journal

This chapter focuses on the Journal of the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon, created in 1937, taken as a key element in understanding the construction of the institutional identity of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, a republican institution founded in 1911. The Faculty of Sciences aimed at differentiating itself from its nineteenth‐century predecessor, the Polytechnic School of Lisbon, by asserting a new research ethos. Together with faculties, universities and university institutes, recently founded scientific societies began publishing scientific journals and publications devoted to the popularization of science, in this way generating a publishing movement in which journals acted as common exchange currency between national and international institutions. The Journal of the Faculty of Sciences is a paradigmatic example of this movement, and is used in this chapter as an exploratory device to show how scientific research was selected as the central piece in the construction of institutional identity. As such, the Journal unveils the new research practices carried out in the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon and encouraged its internationalization, a goal which was perceived and practiced differently by distinct disciplines and scientists.