Ibero-America Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
By James Dacey
Academic institutions in Spain and Brazil account for nearly 70% of all scientific papers from Ibero-America published during the period 2003–2008. This political region incorporates Spain, Portugal and countries in the Americas that are former colonies of these two European nations.
The study, carried out by the SCImago Research group, found that Spain and Brazil each produced around 200,000 papers during this period, while Portugal was lagging in third place with just 50,000.
There are nearly 670 higher-education institutions within Ibero-America, with nearly 50% of these in Brazil, Colombia and Spain. Colombia’s relatively modest scientific output – just 9792 papers – is attributed to the country’s high number of small academic institutions.
The study also ranked the nations on other factors, including quality of publications (based on citations) and extent of international collaboration.
The full report (in Spanish) is available here.
