La situación de la producción científica latinoamericana en el área de la Ciencia de Información Geográfica

The goal for Revista Cartografica to publish a minimum of 45 articles per year has been raised in order to be considered to enter the SciELO catalog. To assess the feasibility of the objective, an estimate of the volume of scientific production of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History member countries in the area of Geographic Information Science has been attempted for the first time. A bibliomet-ric analysis of the articles published in a representative set of international journals was performed, filtering those whose authors are from countries in the region. The US was excluded because of its high relative weight in this scientific area. The main conclusion is that the goal of capturing part of these works and thus more than duplicating the material published today in Revista Cartografica seems difficult to achieve in the short term. It will be necessary to interest authors from outside the region, who typically first take into account the journal’s categorization, a categori-zation that has not yet been achieved, thus forming a vicious circle of difficult solu-tion. Subsidiarily, a country-discriminated analysis has been carried out that could be used in future works to identify active research groups and research lines in the region.