Biological sciences in Chile and South America, 1981-1991: a citationist perspective. Output data and specialty area impact trends.

The purpose of this report is to examine the biological sciences in Chile and South America in bibliographic terms -the number of papers each nation published from 1981-1991 and the number of citations to them in the international research literature. The database consists of 34,600 biological science papers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela in the 1981-1991 Science Citation Index files of the Institute for Scientific Information. Twelve specialty areas were selected to represent the biological sciences of special interest to Chile: animal sciences, biochemistry/biophysics, environmental sciences, experimental biology/medicine, immunology, microbiology/cell biology, molecular biology/genetics, neurosciences, pharmacology, physiology, plant sciences, and reproductive sciences. Data are reported on the number of papers in these fields, combined, by authors based in Chile and other South American nations. In addition, time-series trends in the impact (average citations per paper) of Chilean research relative to South America as a whole, overall and in each specialty, are presented and discussed.