Contribution of Mexican scholars to viticultural and oenological research: where do we stand?

Abstract

Wine consumption in Mexico has increased continuously over the last decade. However, domestic wine production is not sufficient to satisfy domestic demand, and foreign wine producers have been the main beneficiaries of the growth of the Mexican market. This highlights the need of Mexican winemakers for scientific evidence and technological innovations that can help to make better management choices both in the field and in the winery. This paper presents the results of a bibliometric study that aimed to investigate the contribution of the Mexican academic community to scientific literature in viticulture and oenology (1987-2017). Results indicate that Mexican academia has failed to keep pace with the constant growth of the wine industry in Mexico. The growth of scholarly scientific output in Mexico has been slower than that of other Latin American countries. In addition, Mexican scientific output relied to a large extent (36%) on collaborations with research groups from developed countries, while collaborative papers with Latin American countries were comparatively rare (7.9%). Domestic collaboration among Mexican institutions is still limited, as indicated by the low number of such publications (23.2%) and by the considerable number of institutions producing papers independently (49%). Agrosciences, biological sciences, chemistry, microbiology and health sciences were the main areas of research of Mexican academics.