An increasing number of developing countries are considering their highly qualified citizens living abroad as a potential asset for national development. Renewed policies are consequently designed in order to ensure the return of this expatriated talented group. Besides the repatriation-return-option generally enacted in these policies with varying success, a second one has recently emerged: the diaspora option. It consists of the remote mobilisation of intellectuals abroad and their connection to scientific, technological and cultural programmes at home. At the beginning of the 1990s, Colombia began to systematically and consistently apply this option, through the creation of 'the Colombian Caldas' Network of Scientists and Engineers Abroad'. The experience of this strategy has been studied during the last four years by a Franco-Colombian research team. The paper discusses the results of this study. It first contextualises the diaspora option and the Colombian experience by putting it in historical perspective along with the other policies designed to tackle the issue of professionals' migration. It then describes the S&T diaspora in terms of actors and dynamics. The way it works through the Caldas network is presented in terms of an analysis of three major aspects: the electronic list through INTERNET, the local associations (network's nodes) and some joint projects between diaspora and the home community members. The concluding part draws the signific ance of the experience, its achievements as well as its limitations, and suggests indicators and methods that could help develop it elsewhere.

This work reports on the preliminary results of a bibliometric analysis of AIDS literature, as produced in or about Latin America and the Caribbean for the period 1980-1996. Two international and two regional secondary sources were used in order to obtain comparative analyses regarding for example, comprehensiveness of AIDS literature coverage and local/main frame visibility. Less than 1000 records were retrieved from each of the databases searched. Leading countries in AIDSLINE were Haiti, Brasil, Mexico and Puerto Rico. The distribution by year of publication showed a decrease in Haiti records, from 54 in 1983, to 4 in 1995. The rest of the countries either increased or maintained an average production throughout the years. Regional secondary information sources were less current and comprehensive in the field. Further lines of research are described by the authors.

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This study investigated the trends in international scientific collaboration of the four Mercosur countries -Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay -both among themselves and with other partners, prior to and after 1991 when the alliance was officially formed. Two databases were used -the mainstream Science Citation Index (SCI) and the regional Periodica. Intra-Mercosur collaboration was better represented in the SCI than in Periodica. SCI data show a general upward trend for intra-Mercosur collaborations from 1980 to 1995, specifically with respect to bilateral co-authorships between Argentina and Brazil. This is particularly notable since 1986 when two important scientific and technological collaboration programmes were established between these two countries. The importance is discussed of interpreting quantitative data in the light of contextual qualitative information on the countries under study.