Digital Science in Latin America: scope and benefits

Abstract

The use of digital tools is transforming scientific production processes and their impacts. In this article we evaluate to what extent digitalization in science has reached Latin American scientific activity and what have been its effects. For this purpose, we use bibliometric data from three medium-sized Latin American countries that have an important scientific trajectory: Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, focusing the analysis on four disciplines: biological and agricultural sciences, earth and planetary sciences, environmental sciences, and decisional sciences. We find that digitalization has been growing for the past 25 years, but the gap with leading countries has only narrowed slightly. Likewise, the incidence of digitalization varies by discipline. In terms of benefits associated with digitalization, our results show that articles that use digital science practices or tools have greater academic impact (have more citations), more collaboration (more co-authors), and more internationalization (authors from a larger number of countries). In other words, in these disciplines and in these countries, digitalization has managed to increase the visibility of research, potentially its quality and, thus, the social returns of the resources invested. Networks have also been expanded, thus promoting a better use of collective intelligence and the integration of local research problems into a global agenda, potentially increasing the resources devoted to research in these countries.