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Bibliometric techniques and social network analysis are used to define the patterns of international medical research in Latin America and the Caribbean based on information available in the Scopus database. The objective was to ascertain countries' capacity to establish intra‐ and extraregional scientific collaboration. The results show that increased output and citations in medical research have heightened the region's presence and participation in the international scientific arena. These findings may be partly influenced by the inclusion of new journals in the database and regional initiatives that may have enhanced collaboration and knowledge transfer in science. The overall rise in partnering rates is slightly greater intra‐ than extraregionally. The possible effect of geographic, idiomatic, and cultural proximity is likewise identified. The “scientific dependence” of small or developing countries would explain their high collaboration rates and impact. The evidence shows that the most productive countries draw from knowledge generated domestically or by their neighbors, which would explain why impact is so highly concentrated in the regions with the greatest output. The need to incentivize intraregional relationships must be stressed, although international initiatives should also be supported.

Abstract:This research aims to diachronically analyze the worldwide scientific production on open access, in the academic and scientific context, in order to contribute to knowledge and visualization of its main actors. As a method, bibliographical, descriptive and analytical research was used, with the contribution of bibliometric studies, especially the production indicators, scientific collaboration and indicators of thematic co-occurrence. The Scopus database was used as a source to retrieve the articles on the subject, with a resulting corpus of 1179 articles. Using Bibexcel software, frequency tables were constructed for the variables, and Pajek software was used to visualize the collaboration network and VoSViewer for the construction of the keywords' network. As for the results, the most productive researchers come from countries such as the United States, Canada, France and Spain. Journals with higher impact in the academic community have disseminated the new constructed knowledge. A collaborative network with a few subnets where co-authors are from different countries has been observed. As conclusions, this study allows identifying the themes of debates that mark the development of open access at the international level, and it is possible to state that open access is one of the new emerging and frontier fields of library and information science.

Argentina´s patterns of publication in the humanities and social sciences were studied for the period 2003-2012, using the Scopus database and distinguishing the geographic realm of the research. The results indicate that "topics of national scope" have grown and gained international visibility. They can be broadly characterized as having Spanish as the language of publication, and a marked preference for single authorship; in contrast, the publication of "global topics", not geographically limited, characteristically have English as the language of divulgation, and institutional collaboration is stronger and more consolidated.Citation is apparently not determined only by the geographic realm of research, but also by language of publication, co-authorship, and the profiles of the journals where published. These results could contribute to constructive reflection upon publishing policy. The existence of a community of journals that tolerates biased patterns may make researchers echo and perpetuate poor practices, constructing or adapting the channels of communication. Such results also prove useful as a point of reference when evaluation criteria are elaborated by scientific committees, as unsupervised promotion and evaluation patterns could become Pre-print of: Scientometrics, DOI 10.1007/s11192-014-1414-4 2 based on local or overly subjective precepts, disregarding the disciplinary practices of the international scientific community.