The expansion of modern science through the Catalog of Scientific Papers, XIX century: the Latin American presence

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the development of bibliographic tools increased: journals, catalogs, and classifications, which helped shape a world scientific order and the global colonialism that legitimized the canon of European science. Under this idea, the scientific production of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) registered in the Catalog of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society of London (CSP-RSL), during the nineteenth century, is reviewed. It seeks to document, through bibliographical sources, the historical process used to expand the European imperial science in America. A geohistoriometric proposal was used to develop geographic indicators of origin, trajectories, and training of the authors who wrote the LAC science. We also cross the information of these indicators of spatialization of human resources with historical scientometric measures of the scientific output of authors, languages, and journals. There is a proportion of just over two-thirds of authors, institutions, languages, and journals that are external to the countries of the LAC region. These geographic and scientometric indicators serve to document that both human and non-human actors have functioned as mechanisms of scientific communication to reproduce the ways of expanding imperial science to America. As a suggestion, we propose to continue the development of historical atlas of science in LAC.