Correlation between a country’s centrality measures and the impact of research paper: The case of biotechnology research in Latin America

The aim of this paper is to unveil the latent structure of the Latin American regional biotechnology research collaboration network, as well as to determine whether the impact of a biotechnology paper is correlated to centrality measures (degree, betweenness and closeness) of Latin American countries within the structure of the regional collaboration network. To achieve these objectives, 14,173 Latin American biotechnology papers published between 1988 and 2012 were analyzed, using a combination of social network analysis and bibliometric techniques. Results of the study show the impact of a Latin American biotechnology paper is positively correlated to its country´s betweenness, but not to its degree of centrality or closeness. These findings show the importance of developing collaboration networks to impel biotechnology research in Latin America.