Un análisis de la colaboración científica entre los países de América Latina a través de documentos registrados de 1975-2004 en el Science Citation Index versión Web of Science, revela un aumento paulatino en el número total de trabajos principalmente en la última década, así como en los porcentajes de éstos del total de publicaciones registradas por la región. La magnitud de estos aumentos varía; los países más pequeños mostraron los niveles más altos de colaboración, en especial aquellas colaboraciones intra-regionales que involucran países fuera de la región. Los temas más abordados por el esfuerzo intra-regional son de las áreas de la Biología, la Salud, la Física, y la Química. En cuanto a la participación de los países fuera de la región en las colaboraciones intra-regionales, el 40% corresponden a países europeos y el 38% a América del Norte. El impacto de los trabajos intra-regionales con la presencia de por los menos un país de fuera de la región calculado a través de un índice h normalizado, fue superior al impacto de los trabajos en colaboración intra-regional en su conjunto. La colaboración Brasil-Argentina domina las colaboraciones bilaterales intra-regionales que en la última década se han enfocado a temas en las Ciencias de la Salud y Astronomía. Las instituciones brasileñas y argentinas son las más productivas en el área de Física y la categoría de mayor contribución en las colaboraciones intra-regionales, es la Materia Condensada.

The technical structure of the Mexican science and technology literature was determined. A representative database of technical articles was extracted from the Science Citation Index for the year 2002, with each article containing at least one author with a Mexican address. Many different manual and statistical clustering methods were used to identify the structure of the technical literature (especially the science and technology core competencies), and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each technique. Each method is summarized, and its results presented.

SUMMARY Since the international visibility of scientific research is especially important for developing countries, the multidisciplinary journals Nature and Science were analyzed for the papers pub lished from 1973 to 2005 by Latin America’s three most produc tive countries, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, and these compared with those from Spain. The total numbers of publications were: Spain, 696; Brazil, 411; Mexico, 227; and Argentina, 127. Both Spain and Brazil published over 65% of the total papers in Na ture, in contrast to Mexico and Argentina where production was more evenly distributed between the two titles. An increasing pres ence of all countries over the 33 year span was found, more so for Spain and from 1993 onwards. A high level of international coauthorship was similar in all cases (72-75%). The most visible institutions in the Latin American countries were the large na tional universities. From 12-18% of publications remained uncited while three on the genome received more than 2000 citations. Analysis of the most highly cited journals indicated a concentra tion of publications in physics, astronomy and astrophysics, geo sciences and molecular biology, findings which were reflected in the results of a text mining analysis of abstracts.

Recently the use of data mining to scientific bibliographic data bases has been implemented to analyze the pathways of the knowledge or the core scientific relevances of a laureated novel or a country. This specific case of data mining has been named citation mining, and it is the integration of citation bibliometrics and text mining. In this paper we present an improved WEB implementation of statistical physics algorithms to perform the text mining component of citation mining. In particular we use an entropic like distance between the compression of text as an indicator of the similarity between them. Finally, we have included the recently proposed index h to characterize the scientific production. We have used this web implementation to identify users, applications and impact of the Mexican scientific institutions located in the State of Morelos.

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered substantially.Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This paper inflation' is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers' motivation to maximize the metrics.

Citation Mining is an integration of citation bibliometrics and text mining. It can be used to measure the impact, both direct and indirect, of scientific and technological research. In this work we present a Simple Web Interface for a set of command line oriented programs for Citation Mining. The separation of the Web Application and the Program Application allow us an easier and faster development cycle. This system is used by the Government of the State of Morelos, Mexico, to identify users, applications and impact of the Research Institutions located in the State.

The present research-m-progress illustrates how a simple analysis of high-ranking journals can give valuable information on the scientific visibility of countries, especially those from developing regions. Latin American research in the multidisciplinary journals Nature and Science was determined by analysing the papers published from 1973 to November 2004, by the region's three most productive countries, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, and comparing these with Spain. A bibliometric and data mining software was developed to analyse corresponding records from the Web of Science with respect to the following parameters: total number of papers, publications by year and by author, collaborations by country and by institution, times cited, cited journals, and significant words in the abstracts of the papers. Preliminary results with respect to some of these parameters show the usefulness of the method developed.

The structure and infrastructure of the Mexican technical literature was determined. A representative database of technical articles was extracted from the Science Citation Index for the year 2002, with each article containing at least one author with a Mexican address. Many different manual and statistical clustering methods were used to identify the structure of the technical literature (especially the science and technology core competencies). One of the pervasive technical topics identified from the clustering, thin films research, was analyzed further using bibliometrics, in order to identify the infrastructure of this technology.

Identifying research users, applications, and impact is important for research performers, managers, evaluators, and sponsors. Identification of the user audience and the research impact is complex and time consuming due to the many indirect pathways through which fundamental research can impact applications. This paper identified the literature pathways through which two highly-cited papers of 2002 Chemistry Nobel Laureates Fenn and Tanaka impacted research, technology development, and applications. Citation Mining, an integration of citation bibliometrics and text mining, was applied to the >1600 first generation Science Citation Index (SCI) citing papers to Fenn's 1989 Science paper on Electrospray Ionization for Mass Spectrometry, and to the >400 first generation SCI citing papers to Tanaka's 1988 Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry paper on Laser Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry. Bibliometrics was performed on the citing papers to profile the user characteristics. Text mining was performed on the citing papers to identify the technical areas impacted by the research, and the relationships among these technical areas.