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Growth of the number of indexed journals of Latin America and the Caribbean: the effect on the impact of each country

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Abstract

The number of LA–C indexed journals in WoS has increased from 69 to 248 titles in just a period of four years (2006–2009). This unprecedented growth is related to a change in the editorial policy of WoS rather than to a change in the LA–C scientific community. We find that in the LA–C region, Brazil had the largest increase in its WoS production that also corresponded to a large increase in its production in its indexed local journals. As a consequence, Portuguese has been promoted to the second scientific language, only after English, in the LA–C production in WoS. However, while the Brazilian production in its local journals represents about one quarter of its whole WoS production, it shows a rather little effect on the respective number of citations. The rest of the LA–C countries represented in WoS still show very low levels in production and impact. Scopus has also enlarged considerably the database’s coverage of LA–C journals but with a steady growth in the period considered in this study.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by CONACYT Red-CCS (Mexico). The author wish to thank: M. A. Pérez Angón (Cinvestav, Depto. Física), for their helpful comments. Thanks also to X. Flores Vargas (Escuela Nacional de Biblioteconomia y Archivonomia, Mexico) and P. Collazo Rodríguez (UPIBI-IPN and Atlas de la Ciencia Mexicana), for their support in data handling.

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  1. Departamento de Física, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN, Av. IPN 2508, San Pedro Zacatenco, 07000, Mexico, DF, Mexico

    Francisco Collazo-Reyes

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  1. Francisco Collazo-Reyes
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Correspondence to Francisco Collazo-Reyes.

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Collazo-Reyes, F. Growth of the number of indexed journals of Latin America and the Caribbean: the effect on the impact of each country. Scientometrics 98, 197–209 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1036-2

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