THE CULTURE OF SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATION (I)

In advanced countries, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, the culture of science dissemination has evolved and has become a ruling guide the world over. Notwithstanding the relevance of textbooks and monographic series, the prevailing form of communication of research results and of ideas in science and technology is the periodic journal. The number of scientific journals grew exponentially since the middle of the 18^th century up to its progressive saturation in the second half of the last century. The number of existing periodic scientific publications has been estimated in the order of 50000 journals.

In Latin America the production of the latter is not at all despicable. Latindex, the regional online information system of scientific journals, whose objectives are to gather and disseminate bibliographic information about scientific publications produced in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean, and also includes Spain and Portugal, incorporates close to 20000 titles. Of these, almost 9000 correspond to medical, exact and natural sciences, engineering and agro-sciences, as well as a reduced but significant number of multidisciplinary journals. The other 11000 journals concern the social sciences, arts and humanities.

The numerical predominance of the second group of fields is even more pronounced in the publications included in Redalyc, a full text science regional library on line that contains some 400 journals, of which less than one quarter correspond to fields in the natural sciences. However, these numbers must be considered with care, as the classification criteria are not equivalent.

In view of the very large number of publications registered by Latindex, it can be asked why only close to 300 titles are included in the Scielo collection, and less than 50 titles of journals produced in Latin America are present in the Science Citation Index, which encompasses close to 6000 scientific journals from the whole world. The most important factor in the latter case appears to be the language, but in the former one this is not the case.

Scielo is a rapidly growing regional repository of certified journals and the quality parameters it imposes lead to discrepancies that appear to be paradoxical. For instance, while Latindex registers almost 2400 publication titles from Argentina and close to 1200 from Brazil, SciELO currently contains 27 and 176 titles, respectively, for these two countries.

The first reason given as a cause for the differences among the numbers of quality, or indexed, journals in the North and the South is the language, which to many represents an insurmountable barrier that will always establish an important dichotomy in the capacity to disseminate science and technology on a worldwide scale. Much has been said and written in this respect, but it is hard to go any further than the mandatory insertion of English summaries in all published papers, although some journals carry, for each paper, parallel texts in the original language and English.

It is clear that next to the national identities and linguistic sovereignty, which undoubtedly must be defended and fully justify the usage of the language of each social group, limitations prevail concerning the English usage capabilities, on the side of the authors as well as of the readers, especially students. Nevertheless, the language has little or nothing to do with the quality of the published material, which derives from factors inherent to the intellectual conditions of researchers and the level of scientific and technological development of society.

Other important differential elements, among which are the concept of editor and its application in different cultures, the professional character of editorial bodies, the distribution and characteristics of the financing received, will be considered in forthcoming editorials.

Miguel Laufer. Editor Interciencia