We use a data set of Mexican researchers working abroad that are included in the Mexican National System of Researchers (SNI). Our diaspora sample includes 479 researchers, most of them holding postdoctoral positions in mainly seven countries: USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Canada and Brazil. Their research output and impact is explored in order to determine their patterns of production, mobility and scientific collaboration as compared with previous studies of the SNI researchers in the periods 1991–2001 and 2003–2009. Our findings confirm that mobility has a strong impact on their international scientific collaboration. We found no substantial influence among the researchers that got their PhD degrees abroad from those trained in Mexican universities. There are significant differences among the areas of knowledge studied: biological sciences, physics and engineering have better production and impact rates than mathematics, geosciences, medicine, agrosciences, chemistry, social sciences and humanities. We found a slight gender difference in research production but Mexican female scientists are underrepresented in our diaspora sample. These findings would have policy implications for the recently established program that will open new academic positions for young Mexican scientists.

This paper analyzes science productivity for nine developing countries. Results show that these nations are reducing their science gap, with R&D investments and scientific impact growing at more than double the rate of the developed world. But this “catching up” hides a very uneven picture among these nations, especially on what they are able to generate in terms of impact and output relative to their levels of investment and available resources. Moreover, unlike what one might expect, it is clear that the size of the nations and the relative scale of their R&D investments are not the key drivers of efficiency.

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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.