Los sectores institucionales en la producción científica Española de difusión internacional

Abstract

Institutional sectors -groups of centers with similar characteristics and types of R&D- constitute an interesting unit of analysis that can also serve as a useful framework for benchmarking purposes in R&D studies. The analysis of Spanish scientific output included in the Web of Science database (2000-2011) shows the predominance of Universities (66%), followed by the Public Research Organisations (OPI) (23%) and the Health Sector (18%). Non-profit organizations (ESAL) (10%), which include both Traditional Entities with non-Profit Aims (ETSAL) and new Research Structures with non-Profit Aims (EISAL), show the highest impact values, regardless of whether indicators based on impact factors (normalised position, percentage of articles in the first quartile) or on citations are used. Universities present a more evenly distributed thematic profile and it is the only sector specialized in fields such as Social Sciences, Humanities or Mathematics, while the Health Sector is highly specialized in Clinical Medicine. During the period studied, the different sectors tended to increase their scientific production, to publish in higher impact factor journals and to intensify the level of collaboration and internationalization of their publications. Especially noteworthy is the strong rise of non-profit organizations, in particular the case of EISAL, which conduct high impact research mainly in Biomedicine. No relationship has been found between the areas in which the sectors are specialized and those in which they obtain the highest impact.