New data on research landscape of 34 countries across South
& Central America,
Mexico and the Caribbean highlights benefits of an EU-style
regional collaborative research organization
LONDON, Sept. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/
-- Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT), a global leader in
providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace
of innovation, today released a report which examines the research
landscape of a diverse region of 34 countries, across South and
Central America, Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean, over four decades since 1981.
In the latest Global Research Report, Latin America: South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, analysts at the Institute for
Scientific Information™ at Clarivate identify a complex research
landscape and refer to the potential benefit of a regional research
organization to enable further research growth, training and
capacity to tackle common challenges.
Key findings:
- The number of academic research papers indexed in the
Web of Science™ has grown more rapidly for the region than for most
of the rest of the world. More than three-quarters of the region's
research is from South
America.
- From 2016 to 2020, five countries published more than 25,000
papers, another 12 published between 1,000 and 10,000 papers, and
the other 17 countries published fewer than 200 papers per year on
average. Brazil is by far the
largest research producer and 10 of the 34 countries, including
Cuba and Mexico, account for more than three-quarters
of regional output.
- The analysis reveals that regional collaboration is
uniformly low, approaching just 10% of collaboration in
Nicaragua and Bolivia, while Brazil is the most collaborative country
within the region.
- International research output is significant and
increasing - the United States,
Spain, Germany, France and the United Kingdom are collaborating with all the
major economies in the region, but particular interest comes from
Mainland China, where collaboration with Latin America is rising at twice that of other
major countries.
- As output has grown, research subject diversity has
risen in most of the larger countries, driven by international
collaboration. Areas of particular regional strength, identified
through analysis of journal use and citation topic modeling,
include life and environmental sciences, tropical medicine,
astronomy, education and romance literature.
- The report also finds that language is an important regional
factor. With growing international collaboration, the benefits
of enabling access of research findings to a global network of
researchers is beneficial to both writer and reader. Comparison
between the numbers of papers in the English, Portuguese and
Spanish languages in the Web of Science and in the regional SciELO
Citation Index™ produces a similar language balance, although
SciELO has fewer internationally collaborative papers in English. A
fall is evident in the number of papers authored in Portuguese, and
English has become the dominant 'lingua americana' of science as
researchers in Brazil increasingly
seek to publish in English-language journals.
- Open access (OA) is a successful and expanding part of
regional publication patterns, but citation rates of OA papers are
not yet as high as in other regions.
Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist
at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate said: "Our
report demonstrates there are many challenges, common to many
countries. It is therefore most concerning that research
collaboration within the region remains extremely low. There are
significant potential benefits for the creation of a regional
research organization to enable further research growth, training
and capacity building to tackle common challenges across the
region. The European research framework has undoubtedly boosted
achievement and is a model that could work equally well in
Latin America."
Joel Haspel, SVP Strategy,
Science at Clarivate said: "Latin
America is a region of exceptional ecological significance
and has been a source of products and innovation with
economic and social impact. This report identifies the need for a
trans-national research organization that can pool some part of
national resources to drive shared programs and projects to mutual
benefit in order to accelerate the pace of innovation across the
region."
Notes to editors:
Report authors are available for interview.
The international citation data from the Web of Science used in
this report was complemented by regional citation indexes from the
SciELO Citaion Index, providing increased visibility and access to
regional, language-specific scientific literature. SciELO is
included on the Web of Science platform, to which it was linked in
2013.
About Clarivate
Clarivate™ is a global leader in providing solutions to
accelerate the lifecycle of innovation. Our bold mission is to help
customers solve some of the world's most complex problems by
providing actionable information and insights that reduce the time
from new ideas to life-changing inventions in the areas of science
and intellectual property. We help customers discover, protect and
commercialize their inventions using our trusted subscription and
technology-based solutions coupled with deep domain expertise. For
more information, please visit clarivate.com.
Media Contact
Rebecca Krahenbuhl, External
Communications Manager, Science
media.enquiries@clarivate.com
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