Scientific Research in Ecuador: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Ecuador has shown a growth in its scientific production since 2011, representing 85% of the total historical production. These investigations are reflected in scientific publications, which address world interest topics and serve as a link for the university, business, and society. This work aims to analyze the scientific production generated by Ecuador in the period of 1920–2020 using bibliometric methods to evaluate its intellectual structure and performance. The methodology applied in this study includes: (i) terms definition and search criteria; (ii) database selection, initial search, and document compilation; (iii) data extraction and software selection; and finally, (iv) analysis of results. The results show that scientific production has been consolidated in 30,205 documents, developed in 27 subject areas, in 13 languages under the contribution of 84 countries. This intellectual structure is in harmony with the global context when presenting research topics related to “Biology and regional climate change”, “Higher education and its various approaches”, “Technology and Computer Science”, “Medicine”, “Energy, food and water”, and ”Development and applications on the Web”. Topics framed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), sustainability, climate change, and others. This study contributes to the academic community, considering current re-search issues and global concerns, the collaboration between universities and countries that allow establishing future collaboration links.

Analysis of Ecuador's SCOPUS scientific production during the 2001–2020 period by means of standardized citation indicators

“…It is important to note that similar observations about the growth of the scientific production of Ecuador were reported and discussed in previous studies, where the scientific articles published in different periods of time (i.e., 1920–2020 in Ref. [ 10 ] and 2006–2015 in Ref. [ 11 ]) were analyzed by means of various bibliometric tools.…”

“…On the other hand, COMP is the area with the largest count of authors as well as percentage of permanency, which allows this field to be suggested as one of the most developed ones in Ecuador during the 2001–2020 period as also concluded by Herrera-Franco et al. [ 10 ]. Other fields presenting important percentages of permanency are: NEUR, MATH, DECI, BUSI, VETE, and NURS as obtained for decade-B.…”

“…[ 11 ]) were analyzed by means of various bibliometric tools. Here, a further analysis of the scientific outcome of Ecuador is proposed as a complement to previous studies [ 9 , 10 , 11 ]. In this context, the present work has two main objectives: (i) to compute the composite indicator of Ecuador-based authors that have published scientific manuscripts in journals indexed in the SCOPUS database and (ii) to obtain a diagnosis of the scientific production of Ecuadorian researchers as contrasted to their South American counterparts by means of the analysis of this standardized citation indicator.…”

Worldwide Research on Open Innovation in SMEs

“…After we corrected these errors, 396 documents remained. In addition, the software allows analysing the performance of scientific outputs according to various units of analysis, such as documents, authors, countries and journals [70,97]. (ii) VOSviewer: It is an open-access software developed by The Centre for Science and Technology Studies of Leiden University (Netherlands).…”

Multivariate Analysis on Physical Activity, Emotional and Health Status of University Students Caused by COVID-19 Confinement

“…According to the QS Latin America University Rankings 2021 [ 51 ], ESPOL is ranked No. 74 among 411 universities in Latin America [ 52 ]. In addition, the Green Metric 2021 [ 53 ] ranks ESPOL as the No.…”