Abstract:

In recent years, Ecuador has experienced an increase in scientific production. Thus, in the year 2013, Scopus database had a number of 737 articles published, and in the following two years it grew a percentage of 32% (976) and 59% (1174). This growth has been conditioned by two aspects. The first from international origin, where the quality of scientific work was measured through scientific production in high-impact databases. The second, from national origin, focused on the new policies of Higher Education, where the processes of evaluation and accreditation valued significantly the scientific production.

In this context, the measurement of scientific production has been aggregated without distinguishing particularities inherent to the areas of knowledge. In Ecuador, the Social Sciences (SS) showed a total number of 41 publications in 2013, increasing to 61 and 142 in the following two years; nevertheless, these only represent 5.5% of the total publications generated in 2013, 6.2% in 2014 and 12% in 2015. This data demonstrates the relevance of conducting an analysis focused on describing the behavior of scientific production in the SS’ area to understand its dynamic and structure.

This study analyzed scientific production in SS in the HEI of Ecuador, from 2013 to 2018, understanding scientific products as: scientific articles, books, book chapters and papers. To achieve this goal, bibliometric techniques were used, which have allowed to set up characteristic patterns, identify historical trajectories and generate an integral panorama of scientific publications. Data was obtained and debugged from the digital databases WOS (SSCI), Scopus and SCIELO to create a database, which was processed by the software R. To carry out the mapping and the publications profile, bibliometric indicators such as production, impact and scientific collaboration were analyzed.

The results show the increase of the scientific publications in the SS, however, this increase is less significant than the increase of the other areas of knowledge. The bibliometric mapping has identified the amount of scientific production, the main topics of interest investigated, the quality of the publications and their impact. From the scientific profile constructed for the SS, there is a need to perform future studies to determine the most relevant factors that influences the development of research trends in this area of knowledge.

Keywords:

Scientific production, bibliometrics, Social Sciences (SS), bibliometric mapping, measurement of science.