The geographic distribution of Mexican health sciences research

Cronin, Blaise; Arenas, Judith Licea de

doi:10.1007/bf02017721

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…These five organizations are publicly funded, and the first two are located in Mexico City (though both have satellite units in four states). The implications of such geographic imbalances for science policy are considerable, and have been discussed by us elsewhere [8].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The contribution of higher education institutions to the development of the Mexican health sciences base

Arenas

Cronin

1989

Journal of Information Science

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Higher education in MexicoThe Mexican higher education system is complex. In all, there are 250 institutions of higher education, which can be categorized as follows: public institutions; private institutions recognized by the Ministry of Education, the state governments or public universities; technical colleges; and decentralized public institutions under the aegis of various state government departments. The great majority of public universities have autonomous status. Public institutions are almost entirely financed by federal or state government, whereas private institutions are financed for the most part by fee income. The participation rate for higher education in the country is currently 1:80.Higher education institutions and their constituent faculties, schools and departments compete in a free market for academic staff, students, research facilities, grants and public recognition. The net effect is wide variation in levels of resourcing and reputation. Even a cursory comparison of institutions reveals marked differences and seems to suggest the operationalization of the Matthew Effect [1]. The expansion in recent years of student numbers and the concomitant contraction of both federal and state funding for education has compelled the government to look more closely at the effectiveness with which the higher education sector is achieving its objectives and the extent to which those objectives reflect and underpin society's needs. Calibrating qualityIn Mexico, scholarship is assessed when decisions concerning appointments, promotions, tenure or fellowship awards are being made. In each instance, a judgement is required about the quality, originality or significance of an individual's contribution to his field. A posteriori institutional evaluation is less common, however, and in most cases based on a single indicator, peer review [2]. As the pressure for institutional assessment mounts, in Mexico and elsewhere, it becomes increasingly important to bolster essentially subjective measures with more rigorous and quantitative measures of research performance and impact. Jones [3] has reviewed the literature on research evaluation and provided a classification based on: (a) number of publications; (b) citation counts; (c) peer ratings; and (d) faculty awards and honours. But, as Martin and Irvine note [4], these (and other) indicators are not in themselves adequate and should ideally be used conjointly (&dquo; partial converging indicators&dquo;). As a result, there is a growing corpus of work which seeks to marry bibliometric indicators with other more accepted measures of scholarly activity and excellence [5], such that McAllister and Wagner's criticism of most previous studies as being &dquo;rather small scale, based on limited data gathered hy hand, and often focusing on rather specialized fields&dquo; [6] seems no longer to be tenable.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Health sciences research in Mexico The Mexican scientific system is clearly stratified and the distribution of scientific activity highly skewed [7,8]. Not surprisingly, the largest (and most generously funded) institutions appear to be the most productive.…”

Section: Calibrating Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%