Research growth high but regional collaboration very low

The number of academic research papers indexed in the Web of Science™ has grown more rapidly for Latin America and the Caribbean than for most of the rest of the world, according to a new Global Research Report from Clarivate.

However, it is “most concerning” that research collaboration within the region remains “extremely low”, the report says, and advocates establishing a regional research organisation.

The report examines the research landscape of South America, Central America, Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean over four decades since 1981, finding that more than three-quarters of the region’s research comes from South America.

It says the region’s output is diverse. 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.

But regional collaboration is uniformly low, approaching just 10% of collaboration in Nicaragua and Bolivia, while Brazil is the most collaborative country within the region.

Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, said: “Our report demonstrates there are many challenges, common to many countries.”

He said that given the worrying low levels of collaboration within the region there would be “significant potential benefits” from the creation of a regional research organisation 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, senior vice president, strategy, Science Group at Clarivate, and one of the co-authors of the report, 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 organisation that can pool some part of national resources to drive shared programmes and projects to mutual benefit in order to accelerate the pace of innovation across the region.”

International output increasing

International research output, however, 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 the rate 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 modelling – include life and environmental sciences, tropical medicine, astronomy, education and romance literature, the report says.

The report also finds that language is an important regional factor.

With growing international collaboration, enabling access of research findings to a global network of researchers is beneficial to both writer and reader, it says.

But 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, the report says.

Impact profiles show evidence of the progressive improvement in the comparative international research impact of larger regional research economies and annual trends indicate that national average impact is now grouped around world average.

Papers authored from Cuba, in particular, have shown a marked shift into higher citation categories.

The interaction between average citation impact and collaboration is shown to have a dominating influence in smaller economies, the report says.

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.

The United States is the most frequent collaborative partner for all Latin American countries, as it is generally across the globe, due to its “historical scale and pre-eminence as a research and knowledge producer”, the report says.

Over the past 10 years the count of papers shared with the larger research economies has increased two- to three-fold.

An exception is Cuba, where the US is the fourth most frequent partner after Spain, Mexico and Brazil.

For most countries, including Brazil, Spain is the second most frequent partner. But France, Germany and the UK are relatively frequent collaborators and Portugal is a frequent collaborating partner with Brazil and has notably increased its collaboration with other countries in the region, including near trebling its collaboration with Cuba.

Increased collaboration with China

“Also of interest is the increase in collaboration with China,” the report says, “much of which is bilateral rather than through consortia and where it is now a more frequent partner for all except Brazil.

“The growth rate here has been much higher than with established partners in North America and Europe and is likely to be an increasingly important part of the Latin American portfolio in future.”

The report says Brazil is one of the less internationally collaborative countries in the region. Just under 40% of its papers over the last five years had an international co-author and this total had grown from around 30% of its output in the 1990s.

By comparison, Mexico (47%) and Argentina (51%) are clearly more international, and Colombia (63%) and Chile (67%) are more in line with typical European Union nations. Most other Latin American countries have greater than 80% internationally collaborative papers. Some, such as Panama (93%), have very little purely domestic research activity.

The international citation data from the Web of Science used in the report was complemented by regional citation indexes from the SciELO Citation 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.