Science in America Latina:: A comparison of bibliometric and scientific-technical indicators

Latin-American scientific achievement is generally under-represented in databases for a number of reasons pointed out in our study. In this paper we analyze Latin-American scientific production in terms of input (resources) and output (publications). The indicators used were: Gross Domestic Product (GDP), economically active population (EAP), percentage of GNP destined to R+D, and total number of researchers dedicated to R+D. These indicators were subjected to bivariant analysis to determine the degree of correlation with the number of ISI publications.