According to the bibliographical data included in the Web of Science, SCOPUS, Chemical Abstracts, and other specialized information services covering the period 1900-1950, the first publications in mainstream journals by Mexican researchers appeared only in the first decades of the 20th century. Contrary to expectations, we find that the academic community was not the protagonist in the early stages of Mexican scientific practices, but that there was a strong contribution coming from researchers associated with the public-health sector and the chemical and mining industries. We were able to identify in this half century four different modes of scientific production: amateur, institutional, academic, and industrial, which in turn correspond to distinct stages in the evolution of the Mexican scientific production. We characterize these modes of production with a variety of indicators: publication and citation patterns, author output, journal and subject categories, institutional collaborations, and geographical distribution.
A detailed analysis of the research carried out in Mexico in the physics specialty of particles and fields (MPPF) reveals the way the current production and citation patterns evolved over a period of 60 years. The basis for the analysis were the publications and citations registered in the Stanford Public Information REtrieval System-High Energy Physics (SPIRES) from 1970 to 2007. The historical coverage afforded by the Science Citation Index provided supplementary data from 1948 to 1979. Papers were classified into five research types: theoretical, phenomenological, experimental, cosmological, and other, while citations were identified as coming from: published or unpublished sources. Results show that the development of MPPF emerged from traditional theoretical and phenomenological research and that the most notable changes taking place in production and impact are associated with the community's involvement in more productive and more internationally visible research practices, characteristic of large international collaborations, leaders in experimental physics and in the authorship of review papers.
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