atin America is steadily increasing its presence on the world scientific stage, according to a new Science Watch® survey. As the graph indicates, Latin America's world share of ISI-indexed scientific literature in all fields has more than doubled since 1981 and continues to trend upward sharply.

From less than 1.5% of ISI-indexed papers in 1981—roughly 5,600 papers for the entire region—Latin America's share of world science papers grew to about 22,500 in 2000, or 3.2% of the database.

For these statistics, Science Watch turned to ISI's National Science Indicators database, 1981 to 2000. Above, percentage shares of world science are shown both for Latin America as a whole (31 nations in all, including South and Central America, along with Caribbean and West Indian countries such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic) and for Latin America's five most prolific nations in scientific output: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela. In the graphs on the bottom of this page, specific fields are examined more closely over the 20-year period, according to two measures: share of papers, and performance on the basis of citations per paper, or impact, compared to a world baseline average in each field (= 1.00), in overlapping five-year periods.

Brazil, as the graph above shows, is by far the region's most prolific producer of scientific papers. With over 9,500 papers indexed in 2000, Brazil accounts for roughly 1.3% of world science as reflected in the ISI database. Over the last five years, Brazil's largest representation in any one field has been in agricultural sciences (2.6% of papers in the field for 1996-2000), followed by space science (2.0%) and physics (1.8%). By the measure of impact, Brazil performed most strongly in engineering and geosciences. In both of these fields, the cites-per-paper score for Brazilian research was 80% of the world mark. (To give the specific numbers in engineering, for example: Brazil's impact mark was 1.15 cites per paper, compared to the world engineering figure of 1.43 cites per paper.)

Brazil's performance in impact is highlighted in the table to the right, which lists the Latin American nations whose published research, in 14 main fields, compared most favorably to the world impact average. As the table shows, Brazil's best in the fields of engineering and geosciences was also the region's best, a distinction that Brazil also achieved in materials science.

Mexico, meanwhile, also led the region in impact in three fields: immunology, molecular biology/genetics, and pharmacology. Overall, Mexico edged Argentina as Latin America's second-highest producer of papers, with 4,588 indexed in 2000. Mexico's greatest percentage of papers of any field over the last five years were published in space science, with 1.9% of the field, followed by plant & animal sciences (1.1%). Space science also accounted for Mexico's own best performance in impact compared to the world (in fields in which the nation published at least 100 papers): a cites-per-paper average of 5.24, or 77% of the world average. Nevertheless, Chile took top honors in space-science impact for the region, with an average that was 39% above the world mark. Chile's strong showing is perhaps to be expected, given that the nation is home to such key astronomical installations as the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in La Serena, and the European Southern Observatory in La Silla. Chile's own highest percentage of world science, not surprisingly, was in space science, with 1.7% of ISI-indexed papers in the field.

As the bottom pair of graphs below illustrate, space science stands apart for the entire region, both in terms of Latin America's high share of the field and the region's comparatively strong (and rising) relative impact. In the biomedical fields, microbiology ranks notably high both in Latin America's share and in relative impact. Clinical medicine, while low in the region's overall representation in biomedical fields, is leading what appears to be Latin America's general rise in life-sciences impact since the mid 1990s.

SOURCE: ISI's National Science Indicators, 1981-2000

SOURCE: ISI's National Science Indicators, 1981-2000

SOURCE: ISI's National Science Indicators, 1981-2000

SOURCE: ISI's National Science Indicators, 1981-2000