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Science in Mexico: a bibliometric analysis

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Abstract

We can find several studies analyzing the scientific production of Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Peru, Venezuela etc throughout the scientific literature. There are many papers focusing on scientific disciplines, institutions and journals from these countries. However, to the best of our knowledge, we have not found any article that analyzes the scientific production of Mexico, global or recent and with Scopus as a specific database, nor the production in collaboration with its strategic countries in science and technology. For this reason, the present work intends to give Mexico the prominence it deserves by studying its productivity in research by using a bibliometric approach. To perform this study, the international bibliographic database Scopus was used within a ten year publication window from 2007 to 2016. With this sample, we analyzed the production in general, the scientific production in scientific disciplines, and production in collaboration with its strategic countries in science and technology, without forgetting the variables of the citations received from Scival as a parameter of impact on research. This study aims to serve as a precedent for later studies and contribute as a reference of Mexican production to the scientific community and as a tool to elaboration of national public policy in science and technology.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Tecnologico de Monterrey, which supported this study through the Intelligent Systems Group and Elsevier to develop this research.

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Correspondence to Bárbara S. Lancho-Barrantes.

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Lancho-Barrantes, B.S., Cantú-Ortiz, F.J. Science in Mexico: a bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics 118, 499–517 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2985-2

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