Change in the publishing regime in Latin America: from a local to universal journal, Archivos de investigación Médica/Archives of Medical Research (1970–2014)

This study addresses an early case of an association between a local journal and a commercial publisher in Latin America striving to improve quality. The two journals examined are Archivos de Investigación Médica (AIM), 1970–1991 and its continuation as Archives of Medical Research (AMR), 1992–2014. The aim is to characterize and compare the publishing policies and patterns of scientific communication and bibliometric indicators developed under the two different types of publication: AIM as a source of local dissemination and the commercially circulated AMR. Publishing policies, production, and citations were identified in accordance with coverage by the Web of Science and Scopus indexes. The papers and citations were grouped into three categories according to the author´s affiliation: local, regional, and external. This categorization resulted in different combinations of correlations between cited and citing papers, in addition to a distribution of collaborative production and citations by country organized by continent. The comparison of results reveals two successful publishing projects; however, editorial practices pose an irreconcilable situation between the AIM objectives as a regional journal and AMR objectives as a mainstream journal, according with dominant indicators of international competition. Some implications of this situation are discussed in the context of Latin American and Caribbean journals.