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:

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.