COS 131-5
How the impact factor limits ecology's impacts in Mexico
Economic collapse in Mexico in the 1980s amplified existing problems within the Mexican scientific enterprise. Some researchers took advantage of what was effectively a lifetime tenure system and failed to maintain scientific productivity, and salaries at the time were insufficient to attract and keep top-quality scientists. To combat these challenges, the Mexican Academy of Scientists recommended that the government establish the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI), a tiered registry of scientists who meet specified standards of productivity. Authorship of articles in high Impact Factor (Thompson Reuters ISI) journals features prominently in the criteria evaluating productivity under the SNI system, and scientists in the registry receive bonus payments to supplement their base salaries. Since the inception of SNI, universities and governmental research institutions have established their own publication incentive systems that largely mirror the national ones, with the net result that ‘productive’ scientists can double or triple their base salaries. I present the results of a study, entailing 30 semi-structured interviews and extensive document analysis, designed to clarify the impacts of these publication incentives on the topics of and approaches to ecological research in Mexico. This is the first analysis from a five-country comparative study of publication policies across the Americas.
Results/Conclusions
The SNI and related publication incentives were logical responses to pressing crises, and they successfully stemmed the brain drain and boosted the international reputation of Mexican science. These policies, however, inadvertently limit the ability of Mexican scientists to produce knowledge useful to regional decision-makers. Thompson Reuters includes (by proprietary criteria) only a few Latin American journals in its Science Citation Index, a prerequisite for having a listed Impact Factor. Those Spanish- and Portuguese-language journals in the index have Impact Factors that are made artificially low by the fact that the metric is calculated based upon citations from other listed journals. Scientists are thus systematically discouraged from publishing in Spanish and Portuguese-language journals, depriving those outlets of top-quality research. The editorial boards and reviewers of English-language journals have increased influence over the science conducted in Mexico, and potential knowledge users in Mexico – including scientists – have decreased access to the results of science. These policies hamper the ability of scientists to respond to local knowledge needs, make it more difficult for users to access the relevant science that is produced, and preclude the type of ongoing collaboration between knowledge users and producers that contemporary science policy research suggests is necessary.