ICML 9

9º World Congress on Health Information and Libraries

Salvador, Bahia - Brazil, September, 20 to 23 - 2005

BVS4

4th Regional Coordination Meeting of the VHL

September, 19 to 20 - 2005

Beyond external brain drain in mexican health sciences communication

Participants:

  • Judith Licea de Arenas

    Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, National University of Mexico  - Mexico

  • Miguel Arenas

    Department of Animal Production, Autonomous Metropolitan University  - Mexico

  • Mercedes Cabello

    Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, National University of Mexico  - Mexico

  • Verónica Carmona

    Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, National University of Mexico  - Mexico

  • Olga Villegas

    Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, National University of Mexico  - Mexico
Documents:

Beyond external brain drain in mexican health sciences communication

Introduction: Mexico is one of the largest Latin American countries, a fact which underlines its importance. However, the unbalanced development of the nation has widened dramatically the gap between the rich and the poor in the past twenty years. Research is seen as an option to alleviate the health conditions of the poor.
We understand that scientific communication can be hard work, hard work that do not have to be disconnected from the needs of the population. However, research evaluation rely on the number of published papers and citations attracted.
Objective: We attempted to determine the role publications play in evaluating individual research, i.e. gaining scientists recognition, also, if published papers have contributed to the solution of health problems.
Methods:  Papers in the list of “Hottest Journals of the Millennium (so Far)” authored by Mexicans or foreigners working in Mexico were re trieved from the Web of Science. Papers were matched against the main causes of death. Also, most productive authors in each field were matched against the list of scientists recognized by Mexican government as national researchers.
Results: We identified that a total of 415 unique papers that were cited at least once were published by Mexicans or by foreigners working in Mexico from 1995 to 2004 in 43 journal titles (excluding Nature, Science and PNAS).  Papers were published by academic institutions (79%), three of them located in the country´s capital (60% of the total output) in seven health sciences-related fields. Research was published by scientist working in the most prestigious academic institutions (67%). Papers were published mainly in two fields: Microbiology and Immunology.
Conclusions: Our results can under-estimate Mexican research effort since we looked at a small number of  the most central journals within a limited number of fields. Large institutions and the country´s cap ital concentrated most of the output, output that does not correlate with major causes of death.