Is Data Science applied to public policy assessment based on open budget data? What a content analysis of 10 years of scholar publications on Brazilian public policies evaluation can point to the future

Data science is an interdisciplinary area that aims to perform methods for analyzing large amounts of data to assist decision making and is already widely used in the private sector. Its use by many communities that assess the public sector is not so studied, despite the increasing supply of open government data in recent years. In order to fill this research gap, this work aims to understand how the scholar community transforms open budget data into public policies analysis. For this purpose, automatic classification and quantitative analysis techniques are being used in a 10-year corpus of scholar publications on the subject. The preliminary findings confirm very poor use of data science techniques but it shows a path to classify and organize the observed practices. This work in progress also proposes a workflow to be used on data science methods applied to the context of government budget data and public policies assessment.