WHO/TDR/Mark Edwards

The University of São Paulo in Brazil and the National Autonomous University of Mexico have been ranked top among Latin American institutions in terms of the number of scientific papers their researchers have published.

The results were released last week (16 September) by scientists in the SCImago research group who are contributing to the Atlas of Science project at the University of Granada and Carlos III University, both in Spain.

The researchers looked at nine Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries with good publication records: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and Venezuela.

They then identified 621 institutions in these countries that have published at least 100 scientific articles in journals indexed by the Thomson Scientific company's database over the past 15 years.

The Superior Council of Scientific Research in Spain came top, with 59,595 articles. The University of São Paulo, Brazil, came second with 38,539.

The next highest placed institution in Latin America — the National Autonomous University of Mexico — ranked fourth with 24,565 articles.

The researchers have published their findings on an online database that allows users to access the university rankings by country and by different productivity indicators, such as publications in 24 different scientific fields.

The researchers plan to expand their ranking system by including more countries, and by opening up their criteria for inclusion in the ranking by using other databases that recognise journal quality.

Link to online database