Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The research leading to the updated curriculum of the Information and Documentation Systems Program (PSID) of the Universidad de La Salle-Colombia,(part of the Educational Project and Lasallian Formative Approach (PEUL and EFL) is presented. Using triangulation of techniques, instruments and actors as the basis of the methodological approach, the study makes key observations regarding professional profile of graduates and labor market demand serve to guide the curriculum update, which fortifies the areas of librarianship, archival science, and information systems through research training, while providing for new degree modalities. These updates are all aligned with institutional lines of research, making them much more meaningful and relevant to the education of information professionals. The methodology deployed for the PSID curriculum update provides materials for an institution to deploy its own methodological approach that can provide the foundation for curriculum evaluation processes addressing the areas of Library Science, Archivology and Information Sciences in Latin America.

The set of actions and cultural conditions of a society produce information in such a way to act directly on the development and use of services and goods by this society. Digital inclusion and the use of images is encouraged as converging languages within hybrid libraries. We aimed to study attractive resources provided by visual language in social and digital inclusion processes. Therefore, we carried out a literature review on the syntax of visual languages. As a result, a Guide for Librarians was constructed. We concluded that understanding and using images serve as a convergence for those who experience them.

This article presents an analysis of the historical and legal evolution of the Portuguese Archives of District as institutions which take safeguard the country’s public administrative documents. For this, the most relevant literature on the subject as well as historical, legal and political documents are reviewed, tracing its history from its origins, the new paths that are plotted in relation to the increased accessibility to the documentation, and new strategies for the dissemination of information to the public, also considering the context of the various initiatives of administrative modernization and new technologies.

The public library is a conspicuous place for those homeless due to free services and facilities. This article aims to show how the library in its social, cultural and educational, can be part of the social transformation of their environment, creating inter-institutional cooperation alliances, developing actions and strategies on social inclusion and improving conditions of people in street. Therefore, public library should not be oblivious to the realities and challenges of the community it serves.

Communities of practice proceeded from web and from cultural heritage institutions worked on parallel lines to achieve the same objective: to transfer the knowledge. The tools developed for libraries are now trying to merge with semantic web technology. Both need to express instances with different forms of names. Numerous schemes for different uses of the authorities add complexity to our study. This paper clarifies the situation by drawing up a table with the equivalences between nine standards. It facilitates the decision to choose one and the exportation to other schemes as well. Vestigium web project, a biographic dictionary, tested our results.

The number of citations article paper receives serves as an indicator of its impact in the scientific community. This paper performs an analysis of the impact of the most frequently cited papers published in two Spanish Library and Information Science journals included in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and determines the influence of self-citations on their H index. Results show that the papers are cited largely by Latin-American authors and journals with little international impact, whose scant impact, in fact, is almost entirely due to papers written in English included in the journal. The most frequently citing journals for both papers are the Mexican journal Investigación Bibliotecológica, the Spanish journals, El Profesional de la Información (EPI), and Revista Española de Documentación Científica (REDOC), and the international journal Scientometrics. The self-citation rate of these journals and authors is very high (40%); and the elimination of self-citations impacts the H-index while yielding a more objective, realistic measures of impact.

Bibliometrics was used to evaluate the different areas of knowledge, with the aim of defining policies for evaluation researchers and define lines of research. The applied sciences have generally been the most studied, however it is known that the case of the social sciences have a different behavior. That is why this research describes the behavior of the subject bibliometric Information Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean; taking into account the dimensions of scientific production, impact, collaboration and bibliometric assessment at the individual level. Bibliometric analysis from scientific papers processed in the Scopus database; in the period 2008 to 2012 related to the subject area of Information Sciences were used as techniques. For processing and displaying was used the Bibexcel and the Ucinet programs. It was determined that Latin American researchers have the habit of publishing their research results in regional magazines. Although national collaboration is predominantly, Europe is the continent which established closer cooperation with Latin America. Brazil stood out in the dimensions of production, impact and collaboration. The greatest influence on the scientific community was obtained with the journals of high impact factor. It is concluded that should strengthen the culture of publication by researchers from the region in international journals.

This article describes the scope and characteristics of the research developed in the state of Puebla, Mexico, whose results have been published in journals indexed in the Web of Science. The analyzed corpus was compiled by the search procedure with the word “puebla” in the organization and address fields, restricted to the period 2008-2012. We observed from the data obtained that the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica are the most productive institutions of Puebla. Our focus was on the 102 most cited articles of the period. Scientific production of Puebla institutions focuses on the physical and biomedical sciences and this production derives mostly from international collaborations. The multiauthor articles (at least three authors) are the most cited publications, while the individual research papers have little impact according to their number of citations. Finally, we analyze the differences in impact factor across scientific fields.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how a system of economic stimulus and recognition to the research activities in Mexico has impacted the scientific productivity of Higher Education Institutions (hei). This analysis uses a database with information of 27,667 Mexican researchers who have been benefited from the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (sni) at least for one year among the period 1991-2011 and includes 122,406 articles published by these researchers in isi journals. In order to determine the quantity and quality of the productivity of hei we considered as units of measurement the publications and citations. The results indicate that only 28% of the hei analyzed is sued one or more publications in the study period. Additionally, our results show that in 10 universities are grouped both the higher quantity of publications and the higher quantity of quotes. Moreover, it is shown that the maximum age of productivity is at 58 years in the case of the female researchers and 57 years for male researchers. Finally, one of the main contributions of this work is that it show that collaboration activities are continuously growing among researchers.

This paper discusses the analysis of the citations received by the publications of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (ibge) in the period of 2001-2010 under perspective of the theory of diffusion factors. Considering that citations represent a way to measure the spreading of scientific ideas, it is presumable that the larger the number of different authors, institutions and countries citing one idea, the larger its diffusion is. Identifies 3,158 documents citing ibge’s scientific output. Out of 1,272 institutions which citing authors are affiliated with, 748 (58.80%) are Brazilian institutions or based in Brazil, while 518 (40.72%) are from other countries.  Institutions focused on education lead (47.96%) the amount, followed by R&D (22.88%), and the rest (29.16%) is lying on public sectors. A number of 6,168 (81.3%) from 7,587 citation  occurrences happens to be of authors with affiliations with Brazilian institutions, with the rest being distributed between the other South American countries (82.35%), North America (9.71%), Europe (6.93%), and Central America, Asia, Oceania, Africa and Middle East (sum is about 1%). Applying the diffusion factors proposed by Rousseau, Liu & Ye (2012), the Gini Index obtained varies from 0.62 in 2009 and 0.72 in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Concludes that the diffusion factor is satisfactory because there is a large number of authors, institutions and different countries that cite ibge’s publications.