An analysis by Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information shows that Brazilian research output in the Web of Science database is dropped from about 30% in 2009 to less than 15% today.
Since 2009, the percentage of Brazilian scientific output that is written in Portuguese has dropped from roughly 70 percent to less than half in 2020, according to the regional research database SciELO.
Even though the percentage of Web of Science papers from countries like Argentina and Mexico has decreased in recent years, the percentage of SciELO papers has stayed pretty constant.
With about 20,000 papers indexed in 2020, English-language research will have surpassed both Spanish and Portuguese as the most commonly used language in SciELO, with just approximately 17,000 in each language.
As “growing international collaboration” and the benefits of “enabling access to research findings to a global network of researchers” play a vital role, “English has become the dominant ‘Lingua Americana’ of science.”
It’s also said in the paper that collaboration between Latin American scholars and researchers outside of Latin America is “uniformly low,” with collaboration between researchers in Latin America and researchers outside of Latin America “increasingly common.”
In 1981, fewer than 2% of Latin American research output was devoted to regional collaboration, and by 2020, this figure had only climbed to roughly 3.3 percent. Compared to the Middle East, which has also failed to encourage local collaboration, this was considerably lower.
However, even in Brazil, which is the most collaborative country in Latin America, just one-quarter of the 10,000 publications that involved collaboration had a regional co-author, according to a report.
Research collaboration between Latin American countries is “most concerning,” according to the chief scientist at the ISI, Jonathan Adams, considering the shared issues they face. He proposed regional financing coordination to help the problem, similar to what has been done in the Middle East.
When it comes to meeting the region’s difficulties, he says, “there are significant potential benefits” for establishing a regional research institution.
Research in Europe has unquestionably improved achievement and may work just as effectively in Latin America, says the author.
Latin America’s research output has expanded more rapidly than any other regions of the world over the past 40 years, according to a new survey, with Web of Science-indexed publications increasing by more than 20% since 1981.
