Publications of scientists of developing countries in international journals: are they channels to the international circuit for colleagues that only publish in national journals?

JORGE RABINOVICH

SCIENTOMETRICS

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 1992 p. 91 - 103

0138-9130

Bllckenstaf] and Moravcsik (1982) claim that only 31.2% of scientific and technical articles published in the World are detected using the international data bases and the best libraries of the developed countries. Quesada-Allue (in press) found that approximately 50-60% of argentine publications in scientific journals are detected in the international circuits. Our study shows that about 30-40% (when restricted to the years 1983-1985) of all publications by Argentinean ecologists are detected in the SeI; for those same years, in terms of the number of authors, the proportion detected drops down to less than 12%. However, considering only argentinean journals, the picture is very different; when the proportion citations of the argentinean publications of the ecological data base (AEDB) was compared one by one with the citations of argentinean ecologists that appeared only in argentine journals in the 1988 SCI, only a 2.2% was found. When the source of the citations was analysed almost 70% of that 2.2% figure originated in argentinean colleagues. If we eval uate the representation of the three citations made by apparently independent authors the figure drops down to 0.4% (3/722). Thus, it is concluded that the detection of argentinean publications in the international circuit is very low, and that if it would not be for a relatively small number of argentinean colleagues that publish in international journals, their detection in the international arena would have been nil.