Lattes Platform: Brazil's Researcher CV System

The Plataforma Lattes (Lattes Platform) is Brazil’s national system for standardized academic and professional curricula vitae, maintained by CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico), the federal science-funding council under Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI). For a research administrator working with Brazilian institutions, funders, or collaborators, the Lattes Platform functions as the closest Brazilian equivalent to a combined ORCID iD and national CRIS: it is where a Brazilian researcher’s degrees, publications, projects, supervision history, and institutional affiliations live in one standardized, publicly citable record. This guide explains what the platform is, how the Curriculo Lattes (Lattes CV) is structured, why it is treated as a near-mandatory credential across Brazilian academia, and how it relates to ORCID and other international persistent-identifier infrastructure.

What the Lattes Platform is

CNPq built the Lattes Platform to gather and standardize the academic and professional data of students, faculty, researchers, and research institutions in a single digital environment, making that information available to universities, funding agencies, government bodies, and companies. The system was originally developed in the late 1990s and is named after Brazilian physicist Cesar Lattes, discoverer of the pion. It has since become one of the most widely used research-information systems of its kind in the world, with curricula for well over five million researchers and students registered on the platform.

The platform is not a single tool but a family of interlinked systems:

Curriculo Lattes — the individual CV record: education, professional appointments, publications, patents, supervised theses/dissertations, projects, awards, and other academic activity, entered directly by the researcher.
Diretorio dos Grupos de Pesquisa (Research Group Directory) — a census-style registry of Brazilian research groups, their lines of research, and their members’ Lattes CVs.
Diretorio de Instituicoes — the directory of institutions registered with CNPq.
Lattes Extractor / Lattes Data Extraction — CNPq tools that allow bulk, structured extraction of public data from the Curriculo Lattes and Research Group databases, which is how universities, funders, and evaluation bodies pull Lattes data into their own reporting systems at scale.

The Curriculo Lattes: what it contains and how it’s used

Each Curriculo Lattes is a free, publicly viewable, self-maintained record. Once created, the CV receives a stable identifying number (visible in its public URL on lattes.cnpq.br) that functions, in practice, as a persistent identifier for that researcher within the Brazilian system — though unlike ORCID it is a Brazil-specific, CNPq-governed identifier rather than an internationally federated one.

Keeping the Curriculo Lattes current is a de facto requirement, not merely a convenience, across Brazilian research administration:

Graduate admissions. Master’s and doctoral programs commonly require applicants to submit or reference a Lattes CV as part of the selection process.
Grant and project applications. CNPq and other Brazilian funding agencies use Lattes data as the standard record of an applicant’s qualifications and track record when evaluating funding proposals.
Postgraduate program evaluation. CAPES, the federal agency responsible for accrediting and periodically evaluating Brazil’s graduate programs, draws on aggregated Lattes and Research Group Directory data (alongside its own Plataforma Sucupira reporting system) as part of that evaluation.
Institutional and faculty reporting. Universities use Lattes records internally for faculty activity reporting, promotion dossiers, and institutional research-output analytics.
Hiring. Some academic and public-sector job openings request a current Lattes CV alongside or instead of a conventional resume.

Because so many downstream processes key off it, a Brazilian academic’s Lattes CV is generally expected to be kept up to date continuously rather than assembled only when needed — closer in practice to a living institutional record than a static application document.

How Lattes relates to ORCID

ORCID and the Lattes Platform solve overlapping but distinct problems, and research administrators working across both systems should understand the difference rather than treating one as a substitute for the other:

Scope. ORCID is an international, discipline- and country-agnostic persistent identifier for individual researchers, governed by the nonprofit ORCID organization and integrated across publishers, funders, and institutions worldwide. Lattes is a Brazil-specific national system, governed by CNPq, that combines an identifier function with a much more detailed, locally standardized CV format used specifically for Brazilian institutional and funder evaluation.
Depth vs. reach. The Curriculo Lattes captures categories of academic activity in more local administrative detail than a typical ORCID record — supervision history, participation in examination committees, and other activity CAPES/CNPq evaluation processes recognize — but that detail is not designed for, and does not have, the cross-publisher, cross-funder international integration ORCID provides.
Linking, not merging. The Lattes Platform includes a field for researchers to record their ORCID iD on their Curriculo Lattes, and Brazilian institutions and journals increasingly ask authors to maintain both. Recording an ORCID iD on a Lattes record links the two identifiers for a reader or evaluator, but it is a manual, researcher-entered cross-reference rather than a fully automated two-way sync of publication lists between the two systems. Where an automated import/export integration exists, it is limited and CNPq-managed rather than a documented open API comparable to the ORCID Member API integrations used by tools like Scopus or Pure — administrators should verify the current state of any given integration directly with CNPq rather than assume full interoperability.
Practical guidance. Because neither system replaces the other for a researcher who publishes internationally and works in Brazil, the practical norm is to maintain both: ORCID for international publisher/funder workflows, and a current Curriculo Lattes for anything touching a Brazilian institution, CNPq/CAPES process, or Brazilian job or grant application.

Lattes as a model: the ScienTI network

The Lattes Platform’s data model and approach — a standardized, government-maintained researcher CV combined with a research-group directory — has influenced research-information infrastructure elsewhere in Latin America and beyond. Portugal’s Plataforma DeGois, launched in 2002, was built on the Lattes model, and the underlying approach has been associated with the international ScienTI network, a cooperation initiative among several Latin American and Ibero-American countries seeking to build compatible science-and-technology information systems. This makes Lattes a useful reference point for administrators evaluating national or regional research-information-system architectures, not only a tool relevant to Brazil in isolation.

Practical notes for research administrators

Verifying a Brazilian collaborator’s credentials. A public Curriculo Lattes URL is generally the fastest way to independently confirm a Brazilian researcher’s institutional affiliation, degree history, and publication record, since the platform is self-reported but widely cross-checked by the institutions and funders that rely on it.
Data currency. Because Curriculo Lattes records are self-maintained, their completeness and recency vary by individual; a record that hasn’t been updated recently should not be read as a complete picture of that researcher’s current activity.
Access. Lattes CVs are free to create and free to view publicly; no subscription or institutional login is required to look up an existing record.
Governance and stability. As a federal government platform under CNPq/MCTI, Lattes is subject to the same kind of policy change as any other CNPq system — for example, CNPq’s 2026 scientific-integrity ordinance illustrates how CNPq-wide policy can affect researchers who rely on CNPq’s broader platform ecosystem, of which Lattes is a part.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Lattes Platform the same as ORCID?

No. Lattes is a Brazil-specific, CNPq-governed national CV and research-information system used mainly for Brazilian academic and funding processes; ORCID is an international, discipline-agnostic persistent identifier for researchers. Brazilian researchers active internationally typically maintain both, and the Curriculo Lattes has a field to record an ORCID iD as a cross-reference.

Who maintains the Lattes Platform?

CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico), Brazil’s federal science and technology funding council under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI).

Do I need a Lattes CV if I am not Brazilian?

Only if you’re applying to a Brazilian graduate program, funding call, or academic position, or collaborating formally with a Brazilian institution in a context that requires one — the platform is open to registration by researchers of any nationality, but it is not required outside a Brazilian institutional context.

Is a Curriculo Lattes considered an official/legal document?

It functions as the standard record used across Brazilian academic evaluation and funding processes, but it is self-reported by the researcher; institutions and funders that rely on it typically apply their own verification steps for specific claims (degrees, publications) rather than treating the CV as independently certified.

Where can I look up an existing Lattes CV?

Public Curriculo Lattes records can be searched and viewed directly at lattes.cnpq.br, CNPq’s official platform, without a subscription or login.

Lattes Platform: Brazil’s National Researcher CV and Identifier System