Patterns and evolution of publication and co-authorship in Social Sciences in Mexico

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which productivity and formal research collaboration has changed in the fields of social sciences in Mexico. The results show that all fields have had extensive growth in the number of publications, mainly since 2005 when the number of journals in Social Sciences indexed in Web of Science (WoS) started a significant growth. However, there are important variations among areas of knowledge. The four most productive fields, considering only publications in WoS, are Business & Economics; Education & Educational Research; Social Sciences Other Topics; and Psychology. The evolution of the mean of coauthors per paper, over the period of analysis, has not had a steady growth. On the contrary, the evolution has been almost flat in almost all fields of knowledge. The evolution of communication and information technologies does not seem to have influenced substantially co-authorship in Social Sciences in Mexico. Nor has there been a big change in terms of collaboration. On average, 42% of the publications in all fields of knowledge were by solo authors, and 26% were local collaborations, i.e. collaborations among authors affiliated at Mexican institutions. Related to international collaboration, 24% of the publications were bilateral collaboration (Mexico and another country) and only 8% of the publications involved researchers from three or more countries (multilateral collaboration).