Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which productivity and formal research collaboration has changed in the fields of social sciences in Mexico. The results show that all fields have had extensive growth in the number of publications, mainly since 2005 when the number of journals in Social Sciences indexed in Web of Science (WoS) started a significant growth. However, there are important variations among areas of knowledge. The four most productive fields, considering only publications in WoS, are Business & Economics; Education & Educational Research; Social Sciences Other Topics; and Psychology. The evolution of the mean of coauthors per paper, over the period of analysis, has not had a steady growth. On the contrary, the evolution has been almost flat in almost all fields of knowledge. The evolution of communication and information technologies does not seem to have influenced substantially co-authorship in Social Sciences in Mexico. Nor has there been a big change in terms of collaboration. On average, 42% of the publications in all fields of knowledge were by solo authors, and 26% were local collaborations, i.e. collaborations among authors affiliated at Mexican institutions. Related to international collaboration, 24% of the publications were bilateral collaboration (Mexico and another country) and only 8% of the publications involved researchers from three or more countries (multilateral collaboration).
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Notes
The National System of Researchers (SNI) was created in Mexico in 1984 to give pecuniary compensations, as a complement of salary, to the most productive researchers. The funds dedicated to the program represented 27% of the total budget of the National Council of Science and Technology in Mexico (Conacyt) in 2019.
Figures. 5 and 6 in the appendix show the evolution of the number of publications for the rest of the areas.
As was said in the Database section, we only included four categories of Social Sciences in Spanish publications. Business & Economics; Education & Educational Research; Social Sciences Other Topics with and Psychology. The statistic can be shown upon request.
Nine documents were not considered in the analysis. One in Communication in 2003 with 64 coauthors, and 8 in Biomedical Social Sciences in 2016, 3 with 11 coauthors and 5 with 22 coauthors. They were considered as outliers that do not show the actual trend of the evolution of co-authorship.
Given the difficulties of finding all the ways of spelling the names of the institutions, we are aware that not all publications were included in the analysis.
The National System of Researchers has 4 levels, candidate, level 1, 2 and 3, being the latest for the most productive researchers. Most (54% in 2017) of the researchers were in level 1 (Conacyt 2017).
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (A1S9013). We also thank Daniel Rubí for data collection. Claudia González Brambila also acknowledges the Financial support of the Asociación Mexicana de Cultura, A.C.
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Appendix
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See Fig.
Number of publications per field of knowledge in the second most productive fields of Social Sciences in Mexico, 1991–2018
See Fig.
Number of publications per field of knowledge in the less productive fields of Social Sciences in Mexico, 1991–2018
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González Brambila, C.N., Olivares-Vázquez, J.L. Patterns and evolution of publication and co-authorship in Social Sciences in Mexico. Scientometrics 126, 2595–2626 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03644-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03644-w