Growth of the number of indexed journals of Latin America and the Caribbean: the effect on the impact of each country

The number of LA-C indexed journals in WoS has increased from 69 to 248 titles in just a period of four years (2006-2009). This unprecedented growth is related to a change in the editorial policy of WoS rather than to a change in the LA-C scientific community. We find that in the LA-C region, Brazil had the largest increase in its WoS production that also corresponded to a large increase in its production in its indexed local journals. As a consequence, Portuguese has been promoted to the second scientific language, only after English, in the LA-C production in WoS. However, while the Brazilian production in its local journals represents about one quarter of its whole WoS production, it shows a rather little effect on the respective number of citations. The rest of the LA-C countries represented in WoS still show very low levels in production and impact. Scopus has also enlarged considerably the database's coverage of LA-C journals but with a steady growth in the period considered in this study.