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Investigación bibliotecológica

versão On-line ISSN 2448-8321versão impressa ISSN 0187-358X

Investig. bibl vol.35 no.89 Ciudad de México Out./Dez. 2021  Epub 22-Mar-2022

https://doi.org/10.22201/iibi.24488321xe.2021.89.58386 

Articles

Evolution of the scholar community in the area of informetrics in Mexico: 1971-2018

Evolución de la comunidad académica en el área de informetría en México: 1971-2018

María Elena Luna-Morales* 

Miguel Ángel Pérez-Angón** 

Evelia Luna-Morales* 

*Coordinación General de Servicios Bibliográficos, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (Cinvestav-IPN), México elena.5280@gmail.com; eveorama@gmail.com

**Departamento de Física, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN, (Cinvestav-IPN), México mperez@fis.cinvestav.mx


Abstract

We study the evolution of the Mexican community of researchers active in the field of informetrics studies in the period 1971-2018. Bibliometric data was retrieved from ten databases. 938 documents were registered with a total of 2121 authors affiliated to Mexican institutions. However, 42.2% of them have a scarce research production during this period. The production profiles of the full sample are organized according to the publications and citations by Mexican scholars, research lines of the authors, evolution of the number of local and foreign scholars, number of active and non-active scholars, and members of the National System of Researchers and scientific disciplines. Our findings indicate that a high proportion (54.5%) of the authors are members of the National System of Researchers. Our sample of authors include scholars from different areas of knowledge, and the most prolific corresponds to professionals of librarianship and information science. There is an increasing trend in their research production, specifically during the period 1990-2018, but the collaboration network is structured with a minimum set of dominant nodes.

Keywords: Informetrics-Mexico; Scientific Production and Impact; Informetrics-Graduate Studies; Researchers in Informetrics

Resumen

Se estudia la evolución de la comunidad mexicana de investigadores activos en el campo de los estudios de informetría en el periodo 1971-2018. Los datos bibliométricos se recuperaron de 10 bases de datos distintas. Se registraron 938 documentos con un total de 2 121 autores afiliados a instituciones mexicanas. Sin embargo, 42.2 % de ellos tiene una producción de investigación escasa durante este periodo. Los perfiles de producción de la muestra completa están organizados de acuerdo a las publicaciones y citas de académicos mexicanos, líneas de investigación de los autores, evolución del número de académicos locales y extranjeros, número de académicos activos y no activos, miembros del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores y disciplinas científicas. Nuestros hallazgos indican que una alta proporción de los autores (54.5 %) son miembros del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. La muestra de autores incluye académicos de diferentes áreas del conocimiento, y la más prolífica corresponde a profesionales de la bibliotecología y las ciencias de la información. Existe una tendencia creciente en su producción investigadora, específicamente en el periodo 1990-2018, pero la red de colaboración se estructura con un conjunto mínimo de nodos dominantes.

Palabras clave: Informetría-Mexico; Producción e Impacto Científico; Graduados en Informetría; Investigadores-Informetría

Introduction

Informetics has been described by Egghe and Rousseau (1990) as all metric studies related to information science, including bibliometrics, scientometrics and webometrics. This term was originally introduced by Nacke, as well as Blackert and Siegel, in 1979. Informetrics has been considered as the most complete field (Tague-Sutcliffe, 1996) in the area of knowledge associated to the new disciplines in metric studies such as informetry, patentometry and altmetrics (Peters and Bar-Ilan, 2015; Jovanovic, 2012; Hood and Wilson, 2001). The evolution of all these metric disciplines has been studied in recent years (Hérubel, 1999; Gorbea-Portal, 2016; Ball, 2017).

On the other hand, Indranil N. Sengupta (1992) has stressed that this diversity is a natural consequence of the combination of bibliometry, information and library science, science and technology: all these terms may be considered as synonyms in their reach and applications.

Informetrics studies had a steady increase after they were addressed in 1994 by the International Society for Scientometrics and informetrics and of course, other metric disciplines influenced in this increase. Informetrics has been consolidated as a mature field of research with methods and theoretical models well defined to characterize the analysis associated to libraries, information centers and the scientific activity in general (Gorbea-Portal, 2016). These studies are complemented with the use of social sciences methods and data visualization, as well as network analysis and science maps (Wolfram, 2015).

We performed a data search on the informetrics (bibliometrics, scientometrics, informetrics, webmetrics, patentometrics and altmetrics) subject in the WoS databases in the last five years of the period studied. We retrieved about 10,000 files on metric studies, 1.4% of them correspond to Mexican authors. A selection of this sample corresponds to collaborations, communication and scientific policies (Hanel and Mehler, 2019; Uddin, Choudhury, and Hossain, 2019); citation analysis and Hirsch index (Mingers and Leydesdorff, 2015); bibliometric methodologies (Mandelis, 2019); evaluation of scientific journals and impact factors (Collazo-Reyes, 2014); interdisciplinar and transdisciplinar research (Youngblood and Lahti, 2018); bibliometric indicators, use of new databases and mathematical models (Fischhoff, 2019); theory applications, data visualization, science maps through Pajeck and VosViewer software (Ekanayake, Shen, and Kumaraswamy, 2019; Restrepo-Arango and Urbizagástegui-Alvarado, 2017) and finally cybermetrics, webmetrics and almetrics (Haunschild and Bornmann, 2017), which arised by the impulse of social networks. The almetrics has open the way to another type of indicators associated to the development of the Web 2.0, also known as the second generation of Web services (Peralta-González, Frías-Guzmán, and Gregorio-Chaviano, 2015). They pretend to identify the social processes reproduced in the web by the users and different civil organizations (Ayala, 2014).

In Latin America, the social studies on the scientific production were published in the 1970 decade (Krauskopf, Pessot, and Vicuña, 1986) using the regional databases of Clase and Periodica (Alonso-Gamboa, 2003). The evolution of the scientific activity was also analyzed (Pérez-Angón and Torres-Vega, 1998; Almeida-Filho et al., 2003; Herrero-Solana and Ríos-Gómez, 2006) as well as the quality of the local journals (Bonilla-Marín and Pérez-Angón, 1999).

Scientometrics published in 1995 a special volume on the Latin American studies on science and technology (Cortés-Vargas, 2007). In this volume we can appreciate the consolidation of the research groups from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The first Mexican publication on informetrics was published in 1971 by Jorge Robles Glenn from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In particular, the performance of some Mexican scientific communities has been analyzed in the areas of ecology (Castillo, 2000), physics (Contreras-Gómez et al., 2015), engineering (Rodríguez-Miramontes and González-Brambila, 2016), medicine (William, 2001), agriculture (Duarte-Malanski, Schiavi, and Dedieu, 2019) and social sciences (Gil-Antón and Contreras-Gómez, 2017; Contreras-Gómez et al., 2020).

The general aim of the present work is to study the evolution of the Mexican community active in research in the field of informetrics studies. We have studied recently (Luna-Morales, Luna-Morales, and Pérez-Angón, 2021) the effect of local and international collaborations on the research production of this community. Our interest in the present work is to characterize this set of scholars according to their institutional affiliation, their geographical distribution and academic formation. We have identified the authors of 938 documents registered in 10 databases, which include Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. A high fraction of them (54.5%) is member of the National System of Researchers. Our findings indicate that there is a positive trend of the research production in this area of knowledge, with a high degree of collaboration but that the respective research network is characterized by very few (less then ten) dominant nodes. Accordingly, our research questions can be summarized in two points:

  1. How much mature is the research community of Mexican scholars involved in the area of informetrics studies?

  2. What are the perspective of this community in terms of the training of new researchers and the generation of strong research networks?

Methods

We were able to build a bibliometrics database using ten sources of information: Web of Science (WoS) in all Databases (Web of Science Core Collection, Derwent Innovations Index, KCI-Korean Journal Database, Russian Science Citation Index, SciELO Citation Index), Scopus, Google Scholar, Clase, Periodica, Humanindex, Infobila, PubMed, Scielo (https://scielo.org/es/) and Latindex. We expected to get a stronger data sample by including also local and regional databases in spite the diversity of fields they include and the normalization they require. We retrieved bibliometric data for the period 1971-2018 in the April-June 2019 window in such a way the our 2018 data was already complete. According to our data search, the first paper on informetrics studies was published by Robles-Glenn (1971). Our citation search was restricted only to WoS and Scopus. WoS included already a portion of the Scielo collection. The other databases do not include reliable citations data yet.

We have included in our data search the features "Topics" in the case of WoS, while for Scopus we used the search feature "all fields". On the other hand, we used the advanced search in all other cases with two options: by fields and Boolean operators. In particular, for Scholar we saved the data in CVS.

The search strategy that was applied to retrieve publications in informetrics is shown in Figure 1, in both English and Spanish, both in singular and plural.

Figure 1 Terminology applied in the search for research publications in Mexico 

Our search strategy was completed by identifying journals included in JCR-2018 that published articles on informetrics subjects, in particular those in the subject areas Information science and library science. We also included PLoS ONE and Interciencia. In both cases, we carried out direct searches in their web sites on information disciplines published by Mexican authors. The respective data was registered in Excel with the same WoS data structure.

In order to avoid duplicated papers, we used specific matches for author’s names, titles, publication years and bibliographical data. Finally, our search strategy retrieved 938 publications, 542 of them written in Spanish, 381 in English, 11 in Portuguese and 4 in French.

WoS and Scopus data files were retrieved in Excel and CVS formats. In all other cases, the respective files were registered directly and with the same structure used for the WoS and Scopus files. We examined directly each file in order to keep just those associated to the subject area of informetrics studies. We went through the usual process of Normalization of authors names, institutions, scientific disciplines, journal titles and Federal entities. Finally, our data sample was arranged according to the ten general disciplines promoved by the project Atlas de la Ciencia Mexicana (ACM, 2013): biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, engineering, humanities, social sciences, geosciences, and agrosciences.

These disciplines were classified according to the subject areas considered in the (SC) field of WoS. Our search was performed in the process of selecting members and non-members of NSR in our data sample. This selection used a direct search in the NRS databases and the web pages of their respective institutions. This strategy was used also to identify the author´s research areas. Table 1 includes the indicators used in this search strategy. It was necessary to normalize the data on each institution before including it in an Access database.

Table 1 Indicators used to retrieve bibliometric data 

Indicators Description General objective
Production Papers on metric studies Identification of the production by authors, institutions, and federal entity
Papers by research subject Identification of the production by research subject / Papers by scientific area (ACM)
Papers by scientific area (ACM) Identification by scientific area
Citation impact Number of citations by paper Impact factor by author, institution and federal entity
Number of citations by subject area Impact factor by subject area
Number of citations by scientific discipline (ACM) Impact factor by scientific discipline
NSR/authors Identification of NSR members Determination of active/non-active NSR members Determination of active members by NSR level and academic area
Identification of addresses of authors Determination of NSR members by federal entity
Identification of the NSR academic area of authors Determination of the production by academic area

Finally, in order to get a well-organized data sample, it was necessary to tolerate double counting with integer values in the fields of name authors and institutions, as well in subject areas and scientific disciplines. We used TI.exe software for co-word mappings of texts (https://www.leydesdorff.net/). The author network was generated with Pajek software (http://mrvar.fdv.uni-lj.si/pajek/).

Results

The databases of WoS, Scopus and Scholar were pioneer tools in the bibliometric studies published by Mexican scholars. However, some of the first published works in area of knowledge used Clase, Periodica and Latindex (Luna-Morales, Luna-Morales, and Pérez-Angón, 2021). They constituted the first databases with complete bibliometric information in Latin America.

In Figure 2 we used the whole sample (938 documents) to depict the evolution of the number of documents, and the respective generated citations, published in the area of informetrics studies in the period 1971-2018. There is a scarce production during the first three decades with a positive trend in the most recent period 2000-2018. The number of citations is appreciable since 1990 and it is possible to identify five years with an impressive number of citations: 402 (2007), 281 (2014), 264 (2012), 244 (2013) and 210 (2011). They correspond mostly to four papers published in Scientometrics, Interciencia, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and Research Policy as it is shown in Appendix with the list of the papers that generated the larger number of citations in this period.

Figure 2 Evolution of the number of publications and citations by Mexican scholars in the field of informetrics (1971-2018) 

In Table 2 we have included the list of the more prolific authors in the field of metric studies of science and technology in Mexico. We were able to identify 1393 active authors in this area of knowledge. There are scholars with different research interests but the most active set of scholars in this field correspond to the area of librarianship.

Table 2 included the 41 most active authors with a minimum of five publications in mainstream journals. Their production corresponds to 22.7% of the total production in this area of knowledge. This set of authors are affiliated to 14 Mexican institutions which also reflects the fact that field of metric studies of science and technology is a very young area of research. There is other group of 187 scholars that published only 2 to 5 papers with 22.2% of the total research production. It is important to notice that the rest of the research production (55.1%) is associated to 1175 scholars with just one publication.

Table 2 List of the most productive authors by institution and research area 

Num. Authors Institutions Papers Author’s research áreas
1 Russell-Barnard, Jane Margaret UNAM 56 Librarianship
2 Licea de Arenas, Judith UNAM 46 Librarianship
3 Collazo-Reyes, Francisco Cinvestav 33 Librarianship
4 Luna-Morales, Maria Elena Cinvestav 28 Librarianship
5 Macias-Chapula, Cesar Augusto Secretaría de Salud 24 Librarianship
6 Gorbea-Portal, Salvador UNAM 23 Librarianship
7 Gonzalez-Brambila, Claudia Noemi ITAM 21 Engineering
8 Aguado-Lopez, Eduardo UAEMex 17 Sociology
9 Perez-Angon, Miguel Angel Cinvestav 17 Physics
10 Valles-Valencia, Javier UNAM 16 Librarianship
11 Arenas-Vargas, Miguel Angel UAM 15 Biology
12 Michan-Aguirre, Layla UNAM 15 Biology
13 Del Rio, Jose Antonio UNAM 13 Physics
14 Musi-Lechuga, Bertha UACJ 13 Librarianship
15 Olivas-Avila, Jose Alonso UACJ 13 Medicine
16 Alonso-Gamboa, Jose Octavio UNAM 12 Librarianship
17 Carrillo-Calvet, Humberto Andres UNAM 12 Engineering
18 Tarango-Ortiz, Javier UACH 11 Librarianship
19 Luna-Morales, Evelia Cinvestav 10 Librarianship
20 Rogel-Salazar, Rosario UAEMex 10 Sociology
21 Narvaez-Berthelemot, Nora UNAM 10 Librarianship
22 Cortes, Hector Daniel UNAM 9 Physics
23 Ainsworth, Shirley UNAM 7 Librarianship
24 Cocho, Germinal UNAM 7 Physics
25 Fuentes-Navarro, Raúl ITESO 7 Sociology
26 Machin-Mastromatteo, Juan D. UACH 7 Studies Information
27 Restrepo-Arango, Cristina ColMex 7 Librarianship
28 Rodríguez-Salvador, Marisela ITESM 7 Engineering
29 Cetto-Kramis, Ana Maria UNAM 7 Physics
30 Becerril-Garcia, Arianna UAEMex 6 Engineering
31 Roldan-Valadez, Ernesto Secretaría de Salud 6 Medicine
32 Ayala-Picazo, Micaela ColMex 5 Librarianship
33 Cantú-Ortiz, Francisco J. ITESM 5 Engineering
34 García-Mandujano, Esther Ofilia UNAM 5 Physics
35 García-Gómez, Francisco IMSS 5 Medicine
36 Gonzalez, Eric UNAM 5 Librarianship
37 Liberman, Sofia UNAM 5 Psychology
38 Mercado-Martínez, Francisco Javier UDG 5 Medicine
39 Miramontes, Pedro UNAM 5 Mathematics
40 Reyna-Espinosa, Felipe Rafael UNAM 5 Librarianship
41 Rios-Castañeda, Camilo Instituto Nacional de Neurología y Neurocirugía 5 Medicine

Figure 3 also shows that the most recent increase in the Mexican output can be associated with a large number of new journals registered in the WoS and Scopus databases (Collazo-Reyes, 2014), as well as to an increase in the number of scholars active in this research field.

Figure 3 Evolution and comparison of the number of local and foreign scholars in the field of informetrics (1971-2018) 

The same figure shows the evolution of the number of local vs. foreign authors in our data sample. It is impressive the dynamics of the number of local authors in this field of research, with an increasing factor of two or three in recent years. However, we found that 42.2% of the whole set of local authors (951) has a scarce research production with just one or two papers published in the analyzed period. We call inactive authors to the scholars identified with this very low research production (Figure 4).

Figure 4 Evolution of the number of active and no-active scholars in informetrics (1971-2018) 

In Figure 5 we present the evolution of the number of authors that are members of the National System of Researchers. We were able to identify a relatively low percentage (54.1%) of NSR members in our data sample, which contribute with 43.7% of the whole production and with 43.4% of the respective number of citations (Table 2).

Figure 5 Evolution of the number of scholars which are members or no-members of the National System Research (NSR) in the field of informetrics (1971-2018) 

These results are consistent with similar percentages obtained by NSR members in the area of social sciences with respect to the whole research production in this area of knowledge (Contreras-Gómez et al., 2020). We can appreciate that the number of NSR members in our data sample had a strong increase in period 2016-2018. However, this group of NSR authors do not have yet a strong contribution on the whole sample of documents published in the area of informetrics studies. Since NSR was funded in 1984, their first papers appeared in 1985 (Table 3). It is important to notice that there is double counting in Table 2 due to the large number of documents published in collaboration by NSR members and no-members.

Table 3 Relation of the number of publications and citations by members and no-members of NSR in the field of informetrics (1971-2018) 

Members NSR No-Members NSR
Years Num. Scholars Num. Papers Num. Citations Years Num. Scholars Num. Papers Num. Citations
1971-1975 0 0 0 1971-1975 1 1 1
1976-1980 0 0 0 1976-1980 1 1 0
1981-1985 1 1 0 1981-1985 4 4 0
1986-1990 9 9 11 1986-1990 10 10 43
1991-1995 22 30 93 1991-1995 16 17 71
1996-2000 61 73 257 1996-2000 47 49 77
2001-2005 75 95 494 2001-2005 65 73 241
2006-2010 169 201 733 2006-2010 146 161 651
2011-2015 299 330 873 2011-2015 264 287 778
2016-2018 386 455 295 2016-2018 299 325 256
TOTAL 1022 1194 2756 TOTAL 853 928 2118

In Table 4 we included the distribution of the number of documents registered in our data sample according to author’s research areas. The most frequent areas included in our data sample correspond to librarianship and medicine, with 27.2% (17.6%) and 21.6% (28.7%) of the documents (citations), respectively. In the following places we found also that engineering and physics have a substantial contribution to our data sample, with 7.4% (10.0%) and 5.4% (10.8%) of the documents (citations).

Table 4 Distribution of the research areas involved in the production of Mexican scholars in the field of informetrics (1971-2018) 

Num. Authors’ research áreas Papers Citations % Papers % Citations
1 Librarianship 555 1564 27.2 17.6
2 Medicine 441 2557 21.6 28.7
3 Engineering 151 894 7.4 10.0
4 Physics 110 962 5.4 10.8
5 Biology 76 424 3.7 4.8
6 Psicology 51 154 2.5 1.7
7 Sociology 51 143 2.5 1.6
8 Mathematics 49 383 2.4 4.3
9 Education 48 62 2.4 0.7
10 Economy 47 217 2.3 2.4
11 Ecology 43 90 2.1 1.0
12 Social Studies 43 124 2.1 1.4
13 Administration 42 160 2.1 1.8
14 Agronomy 39 102 1.9 1.1
15 Chemistry 29 223 1.4 2.5
16 Nursing 27 18 1.3 0.2
17 Veterinary and zootechnics 24 9 1.2 0.1
18 Artificial intelligence 21 169 1.0 1.9
19 Anthropology 16 133 0.8 1.5
20 Vegetal biology 16 107 0.8 1.2
21 Science Studies 15 32 0.7 0.4
22 Aquaculture 14 18 0.7 0.2
23 Social comunication 13 31 0.6 0.3
24 Ecosystems 13 6 0.6 0.1
25 Astronomy 12 4 0.6 0.0
26 Technologies 11 79 0.5 0.9
27 Geophysics 11 64 0.5 0.7
28 Political Sciences 11 5 0.5 0.1
29 Journal editors 11 5 0.5 0.1
30 Manufacture 10 73 0.5 0.8
31 Design 10 43 0.5 0.5
32 Scientific communication 10 28 0.5 0.3
33 Science, Technology and Society 10 11 0.5 0.1
34 Pedagogy 10 2 0.5 0.0

The large number of documents published by scholars with specialties different from librarianship is associated to their interest in the development of their own research communities, and to the interest in applying some methodologies generated by members of their communities like network analysis, visualization systems and mining data.

In Table 5, there are some scientific disciplines, like physics, medicine and engineering, that have higher percentages of citations as compared with their respective contributions to the number of publications and scholars.

Table 5 Distributions of the number of scholars, publications and citations, according to the scientific disciplines (1971-2018) 

Num. Scholars Scientific Discipline Papers Citations % Papers % Citations
8 Earth sciences 8 17 0.3 0.2
11 Humanities 12 151 0.4 1.7
21 Chemical sciences 29 223 1.1 2.5
40 Agriculture 43 122 1.6 1.4
41 Mathematics 50 291 1.9 3.3
102 Physical sciences 172 1135 6.4 12.9
190 Biological Sciences 212 512 7.9 5.8
222 Engineering 315 1289 11.8 14.6
551 Medicine and Health Sciences 641 2595 24.0 29.5
661 Social Sciences and Behavioral Sciences 1193 2474 44.6 28.1
TOTAL 2675 8809 100.0 100.0

The case of humanities deserves a special comment. This area of knowledge has contributed to the Mexican scientific production with a low number of publications and citations (ACM, 2013). Some of the leading researchers in librarianship are members of NSR in the área V (humanities); as a consequence, they have contributed with an extraordinary number of publications and citations.

The geographical distribution of authors is presented in Tables 6 and 7. There is a very high concentration of scholars in Mexico City (CDMX): 52.2% that produce 59.4% (55.3%) of the published documents (citations). Only four of the other federal entities (Jalisco, Edo. de México, Nuevo León, Morelos) have percentages higher than 4%. This is a rather dramatic concentration of the research activity in CDMX which has been also observed by other studies in social sciences and humanities (Contreras-Gómez et al., 2020). The same situation is reflected in Table 7 for the authors data in terms of NSR membership.

Table 6 Distribution of the scholars by geographical entity in the field of metric studies (1971-2018) 

Geographical entity Num. Scholars % Scholars Papers % Papers Citations % Citations
CDMX 724 52.2 1257 59.4 3913 55.3
Jalisco 91 6.6 106 5.0 538 7.6
Estado de México 82 5.9 107 5.1 160 2.3
Nuevo León 58 4.2 80 3.8 477 6.7
Morelos 57 4.1 101 4.8 559 7.9
Baja California 50 3.6 52 2.5 157 2.2
Puebla 49 3.5 63 3.0 140 2.0
Chihuahua 37 2.7 88 4.2 404 5.7
Tamaulipas 24 1.7 26 1.2 22 0.3
Veracruz 22 1.6 25 1.2 85 1.2
Yucatán 21 1.5 21 1.0 27 0.4
Michoacán 20 1.4 24 1.1 308 4.3
Guanajuato 17 1.2 17 0.8 39 0.6
Sinaloa 17 1.2 17 0.8 28 0.4
Sonora 16 1.2 18 0.9 27 0.4
Querétaro 15 1.1 15 0.7 34 0.5
San Luis Potosí 12 0.9 18 0.9 17 0.2
Tabasco 10 0.7 10 0.5 3 0.0
Zacatecas 10 0.7 16 0.8 19 0.3
Chiapas 9 0.6 9 0.4 2 0.0
Colima 9 0.6 9 0.4 22 0.3
Coahuila 7 0.5 7 0.3 6 0.1
Hidalgo 7 0.5 7 0.3 14 0.2
Durango 5 0.4 5 0.2 29 0.4
Quintana Roo 4 0.3 4 0.2 24 0.3
Tlaxcala 3 0.2 4 0.2 19 0.3
Nayarit 3 0.2 3 0.1 1 0.0
Aguascalientes 2 0.1 2 0.1 3 0.0
Baja California Sur 2 0.1 2 0.1 0 0.0
Campeche 2 0.1 2 0.1 1 0.0
Guerrero 2 0.1 2 0.1 3 0.0
TOTAL 1387 100 2117 100 7081 100

Table 7 Geographical distribution of the number of publications by NSR members in the field of metric studies (1971-2018) 

Members NSR No-Members NSR
Geographical entity Papers % Papers Geographical entity Papers % Papers
CDMX 672 56.4 CDMX 585 63.2
Estado de México 63 5.3 Jalisco 47 5.1
Nuevo León 61 5.1 Morelos 43 4.6
Jalisco 60 5.0 Chihuahua 40 4.3
Baja California 50 4.2 Puebla 38 4.1
Chihuahua 47 3.9 Estado de México 33 3.6
Puebla 45 3.8 Nuevo León 20 2.2
Morelos 32 2.7 Baja California 18 1.9
Michoacán 16 1.3 Guanajuato 10 1.1
Veracruz 15 1.3 Querétaro 10 1.1
Yucatán 15 1.3 Tamaulipas 10 1.1
Querétaro 13 1.1 Veracruz 9 1.0
San Luis Potosí 12 1.0 Sinaloa 8 0.9
Tabasco 12 1.0 Tabasco 8 0.9
Tamaulipas 12 1.0 Michoacán 5 0.5
Sonora 11 0.9 San Luis Potosí 5 0.5
Sinaloa 10 0.8 Zacatecas 5 0.5
Zacatecas 10 0.8 Chiapas 4 0.4
Chiapas 6 0.5 Yucatán 4 0.4
Coahuila 5 0.4 Durango 3 0.3
Hidalgo 5 0.4 Hidalgo 3 0.3
Colima 4 0.3 Nayarit 3 0.3
Guanajuato 4 0.3 Quintana Roo 3 0.3
Aguascalientes 2 0.2 Campeche 2 0.2
Campeche 2 0.2 Coahuila 2 0.2
Durango 2 0.2 Colima 2 0.2
Quintana Roo 2 0.2 Guerrero 2 0.2
Tlaxcala 2 0.2 Sonora 2 0.2
Baja California Sur 1 0.1 Aguascalientes 1 0.1
Baja California Sur 1 0.1
TOTAL 1191 100 TOTAL 926 100

In Figure 6 we have depicted the collaboration network obtained from our data sample in the informetrics studies. We can appreciate two main subnetworks associated to Jane Margaret Russell Barnard and Judith Licea de Arenas, two of the pioneers in this research field. They are affiliated to the National University of Mexico (UNAM). Most of their collaborations shown in Figure 6 involve their own graduate students. Another aspect of interest in Figure 6 is the very low (less than ten) dominant nodes, which induce a large vulnerability of the network. We used the Leydesdorff and Pajeck softwares in order to construct this collaboration network.

Figure 6 Co-authorship network of Mexican scholars in the field of informetrics (1971-2018) 

There are eight training institutions with graduate programs in the field of informetrics (Table 8). Most of these programas require presencial participation of students. UNAM was the pioneer institution in these graduate programs in Mexico with both master and PhD programs. For this reason, three of the dominant nodes in the collaboration network shown in Figure 6 correspond to UNAM faculty members (Russell Barnard, Licea de Arenas, and Gorbea Portal). It has been pointed out also that the training of new researchers has a positive effect on the development of strong research groups.

Table 8 Relation of graduate programs in the field of informetrics 

Num. Institutions Graduate programs Begin Year Learning Unit Character
1 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Master in librarianship and Information Science 1998 Virtual
Master in librarianship and Information Science 2000 Presential
PhD in librarianship and Information Science 2006 Virutal
2 Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM-X) - Universidad de la Habana - Universidad de Murcia, España Master/PhD in Information Magnagement 2006 Virtual
3 Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores Monterrey (Campus Hidalgo) Master, Information Science and Knowledge Management 1999 Virtual
4 Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav) Transdisciplinary PhD, Science, Technology and Society 2009 Presential
5 El Colegio de México (COLMEX) Master in librarianship 2010 Presential
6 Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (UACJ) Master/PhD in Information Magnagement 2010 Virtual
7 Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua (UACH) Master, librarianship and Information Science 2013 Presential
8 Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP) Master in Information Science and Documentation 2015 Presential

Discussion and concluding remarks

The present analysis of the research production in informetrics in Mexico finds a young community of scholars with about 40 years of activity. This community originated in the first training programs on bibliothecology and information science. UNAM was pioneer in both training programs and research projects. Our analysis identified a strong research network of collaboration but with rather few dominant nodes (Luna-Morales, Luna-Morales, and Pérez-Angón, 2021). We were able to identify five scholars which had a clear influence in the development of this community: Jane Margaret Russell Barnard y Salvador Gorbea-Portal (Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecológicas. UNAM), Judith Licea de Arenas (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM), and Eduardo Aguado López and Rosario Rogel Salazar (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México).

While most of the research production in this area of knowledge is published in mainstream journals involving collaborations of several authors (Dorta-González and Santana-Jiménez, 2019), in the Mexican case most of the research production is published in regional journals in Spanish with few international collaborations, with just 17% of the publications involving collaborations with authors beyond the Latin American region (Luna-Morales, Luna-Morales, and Pérez-Angón, 2021). This fact is also a consequence of the large number of local authors in the production of this area of knowledge.

The maturity of a research community depends on the effective implementation of several factors: academic and experimental infrastructure, active leadership, collaborative work and the formation of new researchers through qualified graduate programs (Durand-Villalobos, 2017). Even though the field of informetrics in Latin America and Mexico has been active for about 50 years (Kreimer and Vessuri, 2018), we could identify a positive trend of the Mexican research production starting the period 2000-2018.

Our findings indicate that this research trend is a consequence of three facts: (1) an increasing number of institutions with undergraduate programs in librarianship; (2) an increase in the number of scholars involved in this area of knowledge, which were trained mostly in foreign institutions; (3) the consolidation of several research groups with experienced members of NSR. The formal requirement stablished for NSR members to maintain a continous research activity has also contributed to the steady increase in the research production in the field of metric studies of science and technology.

In the present work, we have characterized the scholar community that is active in research in the field of informetrics in Mexico. Its research output was retrieved from ten bibliometric databases. Our findings indicate a positive trend in this research production just in the period 2000-2018 in both in published documents and the respective number of generated citations. The scholars working in the area of librarianship have the largest contribution in the number of published documents (27.2%) but not in the number of generated citations (17.6%). The scholars working in the area of medicine had the largest fraction of generated citations (28.7%) with a lower number of published papers (21.6%). It is natural that the librarianship community is the most active in this research area since its work is directly related to the metric studies of science and technology. Salvador Gorbea-Portal (2013) has pointed out that metric studies of the scientific information constitute a new research field: librarianship. It is a multidisciplinary discipline that has involved scholars with different research interests, like engineers, physicists, mathematicians and others.

This area of knowledge has still an intense concentration of research activity in the Mexico City metropolitan area: 52.2% of the researchers, 59.4% of the Mexican production and 55.3% of the total number of citations.

On the other hand, there a substantial number of NSR members in our data sample (54.5%), the active researchers in this area of knowledge represent a healthy variety of scientific disciplines. We were able to identify a strong network of collaboration among the members of this community. However, there is weak point in the structure of this network: there is a very few dominant nodes (less then ten).

We would like to stress that, as far we know, the present work is the first study that addresses the evolution and characterization of a local community of scholars in Latin America involved in research and training in the area of informetrics studies. Finally, we hope that the present study will be continued in future work by taking into account the following pints: analysis of the performance of new researchers coming out from the seven graduate programs identified in the present work; and the age distribution of the members of this community in order to determine the perspective of new research groups located outside the Mexico City metropolitan area. It will be interesting also to search for the production in other databases and journals in this research field which are not included in the databases analyzed.

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the support of SNI and Conacyt (proyect A1-S-9013).

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Appendix

Relation of the most cited papers by Mexican scholars in the field of metric studies (1971-2018)

Year Authors Title Source Document Type Citations *Database
2007 Gonzalez-Brambila, C.; Veloso, F. M. "The determinants of research output and impact: A study of Mexican researchers" Research Policy 36 (7): 1035-1051 Article 105 WoS
2013 Nagata, J. M.; Hernández-Ramos, I.; Kurup, A. S.; Albrecht, D.; Vivas-Torrealba, C.; Franco-Paredes, C. "Social determinants of health and seasonal influenza vaccination in adults ( 65 years: A systematic review of qualitative and quantitative data" BMC Public Health 13 (388) Review 99 Scopus
2012 Barreto, S. M.; Miranda, J. J.; Figueroa, J. P.; Schmidt, M. I.; Munoz, S.; Kuri-Morales, P. P.; Silva, J. B. "Epidemiology in Latin America and the Caribbean: current situation and challenges" International Journal of Epidemiology 41 (2): 557-571 Article 84 WoS
2007 Hamel, R. E. "The dominance of English in the international scientific periodical literature and the future of language use in science" Aila Review 20 (1): 53-71 Article 83 Scopus
2007 Lowe, R. A.; Gonzalez-Brambila, C. "Faculty entrepreneurs and research productivity" Journal of Technology Transfer 32: 173-194 Article 77 WoS
2009 Martínez-Mekler, G.; Martínez, R. A.; Del Río, M.-B.; Mansilla, R.; Miramontes, P.; Cocho, G. "Universality of rank-ordering distributions in the arts and sciences" Plos One 4 (3): e4791 Article 73 Scopus
2007 Mansilla, R.; Koppen, E.; Cocho, G.; Miramontes, P. "On the behavior of journal impact factor rank-order distribution" Journal of Informetrics 1 (2): 155-160 Article 63 WoS
2014 Aleman-Nava, G. S.; Casiano-Flores, V. H.; Cardenas-Chavez, D. L.; Diaz-Chavez, R.; Scarlat, N.; Mahlknecht, J.; Dallemand, J. F.; Parra, R. "Renewable energy research progress in Mexico: A review" (ITESM, estudio de la producción Tecnología del agua) Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews 32: 140-153 Review 62 WoS
2004 Morales-Gonzales, J. M.; Benito-Leon, J.; Rivera-Navarro, J.; Mitchell, A. J. "A systematic approach to analyse health-related quality of life in multiple sclerosis: the GEDMA study" (Universidad de Veracruz, Estudio de esclerosis múltiple, metodología cuantitativa y cualitativa) Multiple Sclerosis Journal 10 (1): 47-54 Article 62 WoS
2001 Kostoff, R. N.; Del Rio, J. A.; Humenik, J. A.; Garcia, E. O.; Ramirez, A. M. "Citation mining: Integrating text mining and bibliometrics for research user profiling" JASIST 52 (13): 1148-1156 Article 57 WoS
2011 Arechavala Vargas, R. "Las universidades y el desarrollo de la investigación científica y tecnológica en México: Una agenda de investigación" Revista de la Educacion Superior 40 (158): 41-57 Article 54 Scielo
2000 Ramirez, A. M.; Garcia, E. O.; Del Rio, J. A. "Renormalized impact factor" Scientometrics 47 (3-9): 7 Article 49 WoS
2012 Kaplan, W. A.; Ritz, L. S.; Vitello, M.; Wirtz, V. J. "Policies to promote use of generic medicines in low and middle income countries: A review of published literature, 2000-2010" Health Policy 106 (3): 211-224 Review 47 WoS
2001 Ingwersen, P.; Larsen, B.; Rousseau, R.; Russell, J. "The publication-citation matrix and its derived quantities" Chinese Science Bulletin 46: 524-528 Editorial Material 46 WoS
2014 Vessuri, H.; Guédon, J.-C.; Cetto, A. M. "Excellence or quality? Impact of the current competition regime on science and scientific publishing in Latin America and its implications for development" Current Sociology 62 (5): 647-665 Article 41 Scopus
2016 Cadenas, E.; Rivera, W.; Campos-Amezcua, R.; Heard, C. "Wind speed prediction using a univariate ARIMA model and a multivariate NARX model" (Es un estudio de impacto de variables, varias instituciones de México) Energies 9 (2):109- Article 40 Scopus
2013 Gonzalez-Brambila, C. N.; Veloso, F. M.; Krackhardt, D. "The impact of network embeddedness on research output" Research Policy 42 (9): 1555-1567 Article 39 WoS
2010 Olivas-Avila, J. A.; Musi-Lechuga, B. "Analysis of the production of psychology professors in Spain in journal articles of the Web of Science" Psicothema 23 (2): 267-273 Article 36 WoS
2009 Musi-Lechuga B., Olivas-Ávila J.A., Buela-Casal G. "Producción científica de los programas de Doctorado en Psicología Clínica y de la Salud de España" International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology 9 (1): 161-173 Article 36 Scopus
2000 Urzua, C. M. "A simple and efficient test for Zipf’s law" Economics Letters 66 (3): 257-260 Article 35 WoS
2014 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 Article 34 WoS
1995 Lozoya, X.; Rivera-Arce, E.; Dominguez, F.; Arellano, M. L.; Muñoz, O. "Archives of medical research: An historical and subject coverage overview" Archives of Medical Research 26: S1-S5 Article 33 WoS
2010 Li, W. T.; Miramontes, P.; Cocho, G. "Fitting Ranked Linguistic Data with Two-Parameter Functions" Entropy 12 (7): 1743-1764 Article 31 WoS
2008 Naumis G. G.; Cocho G. "Tail universalities in rank distributions as an algebraic problem: The beta-like function" Physica A 387 (1): 84-96 Article 30 Scopus

* This column includes the databases that were used to retrieve articles and number of citations

Received: December 12, 2020; Accepted: June 16, 2021

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