Abstract
Central America is recognized as a mega diverse "hot-spot" and one of its smaller countries, Costa Rica, as one of the world's leaders in the study and conservation of tropical biodiversity. For this study, inspired by the 60th anniversary of the journal Revista de Biología Tropical, we tabulated all the scientific production on Costa Rican biodiversity published in Revista de Biología Tropical between 2000 and 2010. Most articles are zoological (62%) and 67% of authors had only one publication in the jounal within that period. A 54% of articles were published in English and 46% in Spanish. A 41% of articles were written in collaboration among Costa Rican institutions and 36% in collaboration with foreign institutions. The Collaboration Index was 2.53 signatures per article. Visibility in American sources was 56% in Google Scholar and 42.66% in the Web of Science, but the real visibility and impact are unknown because these sources exclude the majority of tropical journals. Revista de Biología Tropical is the main output channel for Costa Rican biology and despite its small size, Costa Rica occupies the 10th. place in productivity among Latin American countries, with productivity and impact levels that compare favorably with larger countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile.
Highlights
All of Central America is recognized as a mega diverse “hot-spot” and one of its smaller countries, Costa Rica, is among the world’s leaders in the study and conservation of Tropical biodiversity, was well as one of the best studied Latin American countries from the point of view of scientometrics (Monge-Nájera & Ho 2012)
We applied the bibliometric indices of collaboration (IC: number of authors per item/total articles, i.e. mean authors per item) and productivity based on Lotka (IP logarithm of the number of original articles that identify the authors in productivity levels, small: with 1 item and a PI equal to zero, medium: 2 to 9 items with IP zero and less than 1, and large producers: 10 or more IP contributions greater than 1)
According to subject we found that 133 papers were on Zoology (72 taxonomic), 129 on Ecology, 46 on Botany (12 taxonomic) and the rest had less than 20 articles: Biochemistry 16, Prospecting and Ethology 13 each, Microbiology and Genetic Diversity 6 each
Summary
All of Central America is recognized as a mega diverse “hot-spot” and one of its smaller countries, Costa Rica, is among the world’s leaders in the study and conservation of Tropical biodiversity, was well as one of the best studied Latin American countries from the point of view of scientometrics (Monge-Nájera & Ho 2012). Two years later Barrientos & Monge-Nájera (1990) analyzed a total of 1 529 articles published between 1950 and 1989 in the journal Turrialba. In Latin America, which in the Biological Abstracts sample leads the world’s production of tropical biology papers, the most productive countries were Argentina, Chile and Costa Rica; a second block included Uruguay, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama and Puerto Rico (Monge-Nájera & Nielsen 2005). Gómez was one of the outstanding Latin American botanists of the 20th century acording to Bohlen (1993), and his productive career that covered 39 years (1968-2009) was studied by Monge-Nájera et al based in productivity and on the personal life events through which Gómez lived (2010). American Fern Journal and Phytologia and that he did not fit well into the expected patterns of how personal life affects scientific productivity (Monge-Nájera et al 2010)
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