1 Introduction

In the early 1980s, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chile experienced a radical change in its institutional structure. The university system, which in the country has always concentrated most of the scientific research, incorporated a market logic in its operations. The foundation of new private universities was facilitated, and public funding was reduced, forcing the new self-financing practices of entities that previously depended fundamentally on the State (Brunner, 2009). Thus, soon the higher education institutions multiplied and from the eight universities that had existed for decades, we arrived at 60 today. Also, in 1982, Fondecyt, a public fund to promote scientific and technological research, begins to operate through competitions in which the quality of the projects and the productivity of the contending scientists are evaluated. In the following decades, the funds provided by this way increased significantly and diversified (for initiation, postdoctoral or associative projects, among others) and became the main source of research funding in the country. It is a highly competitive program in which both to participate with prospects for success and get the final report’s approval it is essential to demonstrate scientific productivity in mainstream indexed publications — in Web of Science, first, and Scopus, after this last indexing appeared, in 2004.¹

In 2006, a national system for the Quality Assurance of Higher Education was established, one of whose functions has been the accreditation of universities and their programs, which has various practical effects relevant to their existence: it enables them to receive State funds and scholarships for their students, and increases their academic prestige (Zapata & Tejeda, 2016). In this system, as in Fondecyt contests, mainstream scientific productivity is an indicator of first relevance.

These institutional transformations promoting competition and that in Chile occurred earlier and more consistently than in other Latin American countries, have significantly transformed the dynamics of scientific research and the balance between its local and international orientation. The result is that today, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, Chilean scientists constitute a population well adapted to internationalization and to a regulation expressed in the indexation system of the global mainstream. It is a population that exhibits a “good behavior” in the matter, pressured or motivated by an institutional system that goes from the State scientific agencies to the universities; it has shown a significant degree of conformity or practical adjustment to this logic.

The objectives of this article are: (1) To explore some institutional processes that have contributed to making operative, in the country, a device for regulating scientific activity that guides its production towards the international mainstream. (2) Check the results attributable to such a device, which, as I propose, would account for a population that behaves well, that adjusts and self-regulates according to the orientations of this device. (3) Characterize the researchers of this population, especially regarding their internationalization, which would help explain or understand their propensity to adjust the management of their scientific activity responding to the mainstream indexation parameters, thus adapting to the international regulatory mechanism.

I begin, in the first section, by presenting the population of Chilean scientific researchers, highlighting some of its characteristics and recent evolution. In the next section, I explain some institutional factors that have played a crucial role in promoting international mainstream orientation. Based on secondary data, I present results referred to productivity and international connection. These results are manifestations of the international “good behavior” of Chilean scholars. For the following sections, I rely on an empirical investigation based on a survey to a representative sample of researchers. In the third section, I explain the investigation procedure and analyze some characteristics of the sample. In the fourth section, I describe the international activity of the researchers studied, paying attention to their international publications. I close the text with a section of conclusions.

2 The Population of Scientific Researchers in Chile

According to the OECD definition, by scientific researcher we will understand a professional involved in the conception or creation of new knowledge, products, processes, methods, systems, and in the management of the respective projects. The population of researchers constitutes a fundamental component of the scientific development of a country and therefore it is relevant to study its characteristics, development and international insertion (Comisión Presidencial Ciencia para el Desarrollo de Chile, 2015). In what follows, I expose some characteristics of the Chilean scientific population as a whole, according to the secondary information available.

The determination of the total number of those who make up the population of scientists in the country has some difficulties. There is no data base or directory that allows unambiguously elucidate the figures. However, the most reliable estimates make it possible to state that the figure is higher than 14,000 researchers. The Research Network in Science and Technology (RICYT, 2018) registers 14,200 researchers by 2016. CONICYT (2015) estimates the “scientific talent pool” or authors of the country’s scientific production at around 13,000 researchers, for 2013, based on analysis of publications (p. 20).²

As for the number of researchers, Chile appears in fourth place in Latin America, after Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. This, however, does not consider the different population sizes between countries. Calculating their proportion with respect to the economically active population (EAP), 1.62 scientific researchers (natural persons) result per 1,000 members of the workforce (RICYT, 2018). This proportion of researchers is well below that shown by the Nordic countries with more than 12 researchers per 1,000 workers or from the U.S.A. or other European countries, such as Austria, Belgium, and Great Britain, where it is greater than nine (UNESCO, 2019). On the other hand, it surpasses many Latin American countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Peru and Uruguay (RICYT, 2018).

National expenditure on Investment and Development as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP), which in the case of Chile is 0.36% in 2016, provides a measure of the national effort in the advancement of science.³ Combining this rate and the number of researchers (NP) per 1,000 members of the EAP, Chile’s position is obtained among the countries of the Ibero-American area, which is recorded in the following table.

Regarding the distribution by gender, Chile has a very low proportion of women in the population of scientists, which is among the lowest in Latin American countries. Only 33% are women, in 2016, while in Argentina they are 53%, in Uruguay 50%, in Portugal 44%, and in Colombia 37% (RICYT, 2018).

3 Institutional Regulation of Scientific Production and Its Results

In the Chilean case, a very central way of regulating scientific activity operates, indirectly, through competitive public grants that finance research. They evaluate what counts as “scientific productivity.” What is defined as such is what project evaluators will consider and what researchers will target to achieve. Any definition of productivity is a contingent and always questionable construction; nevertheless, in the last couple of decades, a particular version of productivity has been stabilized in the country and has been generalized through scientific and university institutions, acquiring for the participants the character of a unique, evident and inescapable reality.

In its 40 years, Fondecyt has funded more than 20,000 projects. In its beginnings, until 1988, it did not finance more than 100 projects annually, while currently there are more than one thousand by year.

In the main Fondecyt research projects competition, the so-called “regular”, 40% of the evaluation of each project corresponds to the score assigned by productivity, registering each researcher up to ten publications made during the last five years. The weighting of these publications responds to the criteria determined by the different scientific committees, integrated each one by seven to fourteen academics of the different universities of the country, appointed through a process of self-selection (the members propose new members) considering their academic trajectories, that rotate every three years.⁶

These committees or “Study Groups” are 27 at present. In 59.3% of them, exclusively publications indexed as Web of Science are taken into account. Only in 33.3% (9 groups), articles of the regional, Ibero-American, platform, SciELO, are considered, and when this is done the assigned score is, on average, 0.38, less than half of what is assigned to a WoS publication, which in general is 1 and on average 0.85.⁷

Of the 16 Study Groups of natural, physical and applied sciences (biology, earth sciences, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, engineering, etc.), 15 exclusively consider Web of Science publications, as recorded in the Journal Citation Report published by Clarivate Analytics, also including the impact factor, although with different forms of weighting and calculation according to committee. Agronomy is the only one of these groups that also considers Scopus and SciELO publications, although giving them a very low score (0.15), which is marginal. No one could win in these disciplines by having only articles with these indexations.

In the 11 social science groups (anthropology & archeology, legal and political sciences, sociology, geography & urbanism, economics & administration, psychology, history, education, philosophy, etc.), the two types of publications with greater weighting are books and WoS articles. Nine groups give books the highest score, that is, 1; a group assigns them 0.75 points, and only the economy & administration group does not consider them. Scopus publications are considered by all, except economics & administration, with an average of 0.72. The articles SciELO are considered by all except two groups (economics & administration and arts & architecture), and with an average of 0.38 points. Six groups also consider the ERIH indexing, European base focused on the humanities, which now also includes social sciences.⁸ Only three groups include publications of the Latin American base Latindex (Catalog), assigning them 0.32 points on average; some other groups accept publications of this indexation in the category “others”, giving them low scores, on average 0.20.⁹ In concordance with the assessment given to the books, ten social science groups also assign scores to book chapters, on average 0.47 points.

Given that way of assigning scores, the signals regarding which publications are most valued are clear. Consequently, the main effort of Chilean researchers is focused on WoS and Scopus publications. For academics of the natural, physical, and applied sciences, with only WoS available to compete, they should concentrate on the ones with the greatest impact factor, which, with exceptions, are not those located on local territory and are mostly written in English. In the case of the social sciences, the researchers’ effort is oriented towards WoS and Scopus journals, and to the publication of books. The SciELO articles, as I have noted, receive a low average score (0.38), which in history and philosophy drops to 0.25 and 0.20, respectively, not showing the committees of these disciplines a higher value for a regional platform. For its part, the only group that gives SciELO high marks is education, with 0.7. It would be necessary to follow an investigative procedure of an interpretative kind, similar to the one used by Lamont (2009), within the committees, to explain decisions such as that of the history committee that devalues publications in Latin America or the education committee that values them more than the other groups.

Regarding the social sciences, considering together all the publications that are accounted for in these evaluations — books, book chapters (both mainly locally oriented), and articles indexed in Latin American or Ibero-American bases —, they achieve a certain balance with those of international orientation from the mainstream. A contestant with pure WoS and Scopus publications will be more likely to win; however, another with a combination of books, SciELO publications and book chapters could also be successful, especially if he also includes some mainstream publication.¹⁰

4 An Empirical Study on Chilean Researchers

5 International Scientific Activity of Researchers

The researchers studied exhibit varied international activities, ranging from graduate training to various academic and research work abroad, as well as collaboration in international projects. 64.3% of researchers have completed graduate studies abroad, 71.0% have carried out research internships in international centers, 47.2% have had stays as a guest professor at a foreign university. Stays abroad and international connections for research are quite widespread in Chilean scientists. In addition, 72.9% have made presentations at international congresses in the last five years; if we asked about a more extended period, almost all of them would likely have indicated doing so. Table 7 shows the countries in which such activities have been carried out. Of all the international activities carried out, 52.3% have taken place in Europe and 23% in North America. The interest in the connection with the central countries is marked. Only 17.2% of the activities have taken place in Latin American countries other than Chile.

As for research collaboration, 61.1% have been in at least one international project, either as main researcher or as co-investigator; 43.7% have led at least one and 30.8% have led more than one. In addition, 33.0% of those who have had international collaboration have participated in three or more different teams.

The following table records the average amounts of projects in which respondents have participated, both nationally and internationally. A higher level of internationalization is observed in technology and applied sciences.

To carry out international activities, researchers have received support from both their institutions and CONICYT. 54.3% of respondents said they had “broad support” from their institution, and just 5.8% said they had not received any support. On the other hand, 50.5% declare to be very satisfied with the support of CONICYT, while a reduced 16.5% say they have a low degree of satisfaction. The highest percentage of “broad support” responses is observed in the exact and natural sciences (62.1%), and the lowest in the humanities (44.4%). There are no differences in the support that men and women receive.¹⁵

These Chilean researchers not only have a significant participation in international activities, but also have the predisposition already incorporated to continue participating. Regarding future projections, 89.9% declare that they have a “high interest” in carrying out collaborative work with foreign researchers and 76.0% in carrying out research stays in other countries. Those who claim to have low interest in these activities are a net minority: 1.9% in collaborative work and 7.7% in international stays.

6 Conclusions

Although Chile’s investment in science and technology is low and has practically not increased in recent years, the country has achieved a significant rise in its scientific productivity in the international mainstream, significantly higher than in the rest of the the region’s countries. What explains this fact?

According to what I have shown, a device for regulating the conduct of researchers has been established. It is based on the system of research project competitions, the incentives offered by universities to their academics, and the accreditation system for universities and programs, all of which consider indexed publications such as WoS and Scopus and, secondarily, only for the social sciences, the SciELO index, as fundamental indicators of scientific productivity. Such indexing mechanisms are thus the core of the device and become guides and attractors for the publishing decisions of Chilean researchers. This adherence to international indexations, which spreads in national institutions and affects the researchers’ practice, shapes how scientific production is valued and influences what is conceived as the quality of scientific production.

This form of regulation is part of a significant process of internationalization of Chilean scientific activity. The State's policies of the last two decades have contributed to this (Kaluf, 2014). The most prominent of them is the scholarship program for graduate studies abroad. This policy has increased and reinforced the national pool of researchers and contributed to the establishment of international networks. It has facilitated the acquisition of an “international habitus”: the management of the tacit criteria that allow an effective performance in the international space, in the activities of collaboration, presentation of results and publishing (Weidemann, 2010). It has also contributed to the students’ mastery of foreign languages, especially English. This scholarship policy, as well as the various ways of financing for international collaboration included in the research project competitions, have encouraged and helped Chilean researchers to adapt to the international scientific field and to understand its rules, incorporating this international perspective in their scientific habitus.

This valorization and support for internationalization, on the part of the State, has been increasing during the last couple of decades and has translated directly into university institutions. It accompanies the consolidation of research work as a central component of the mission of many universities (Bernasconi, 2010). In these institutions, at present, the evaluation of academic performance and scientific productivity has as its central factor the international indexing — WoS, Scopus, and SciELO. It has also been increasingly generalized the delivery of economic incentives that reward publications with such indexations, and that can reach the equivalent to half monthly salary or more, acquiring, therefore, clear guiding and driving capacity. Monetary incentives contribute to stabilizing the mainstream international publishing pattern. This accounts for the rapid growth of the indexed productivity of the universities that have applied these measures.¹⁹

In this framework, national scientific journals, in turn, seek to “ascend” in their indexations: at least to Latindex, from there to SciELO and, if possible, Scopus, with the aspiration to one day reach WoS.²⁰ The indexation achieved increases the value of the journal in the local circuit. Those that do not reach at least the level of SciELO lose appeal to many authors. There are displacements of researchers, from one to another journal, depending on their indexations. Non-indexed journals tend to disappear and those that are only Latindex lose academic relevance. In Chile, the “structural heterogeneity”, which Beigel (2014) notes in the case of Argentina, is not configured. In Argentina, there is a local second circuit, institutionally supported, absent in Chile. In the regulation prevailing in Chile, evaluation criteria of productivity are consistently aligned among CONICYT (ANID), the higher education’s system of accreditation and the universities. The result in this matter is “structural homogeneity”. This is a manifestation of the high state centralization that the Chilean university system has had since its origins.

Consequently, the current national scientific activity has a preponderant orientation towards the central countries. There is a strong projection and dedication to positioning the country in the competition of the big leagues rather than to integrating research regionally. Although in the 1960s Chile was a prominent “peripheral center” of the social sciences in Latin America (Beigel, 2013), nowadays, instead of attending the regional circuit, researchers in these disciplines place their interest primarily in central countries, like the other scientific disciplines.

Faced with this reorientation of scientific activity, Chilean researchers have responded in a very adaptive way, in a “well behaved” manner.²¹ Until 2018 there had only been criticism and resistance of some importance in the social sciences, from which some adjustments in the evaluation criteria have been derived. In these disciplines, some researchers declare that publishing in such journals, in a significant part of the cases, separates them from local concerns and discussions, reducing researchers’ attention to problems of national relevance and weakening the response of science to local needs. However, this could be a false dilemma. Working to publish in international journals does not necessarily imply paying reduced attention to local problems. Moreover, there is no a priori reason to suppose that local problems cannot be illuminated by international literature. This is undoubtedly a subject that would require further debate and empirical investigation on such effects, positive and negative. Nevertheless, the main component of the transaction formula considering this criticism, which has been negotiated in the Fondecyt committees, has been incorporating books in the evaluation of productivity. The book is a type of product that reaches a more varied audience, especially local. The other negotiated element has been the additional inclusion of the SciELO and Latindex indexations, although they have been left with significantly lower weights. The result in the social sciences is a double and simultaneous international and local orientation. It is a formula in which, despite the changes, in the international perspective, WoS and Scopus indexing prevail, making it difficult to avoid publishing in English.

Thus, although there is a certain critical discourse that questions the weight of these indexations, they have slowly become a core part of the regulation mechanism of Chilean scientific production. The space of commensurability created by international indexations, along with reproducing asymmetries, has also been beneficial to the Chilean academy. It has pushed scholars to higher quality standards of production, to explore new scientific literature and to update their discussions, with a wider perspective. The resulting papers, in turn, have a greater capacity to be understood by other scientific audiences. Participating in international networks pays off when the quality of local science is improved.

The positive effects that this regulation has had on the country's positioning in the global competition have given arguments to the national authorities to preserve it. From the side of the critical voices, on the other hand, the articulation of a discourse, an organized action, or well-defined alternative proposals has not occurred so far. However, after the social outbreak of October 2019, as part of the meetings and cabildos with the participation of scientists, which were carried out along the country, the questioning of the predominance of the international orientation of science and the centrality of its evaluation by way of WoS and Scopus indexed publications has become more intense and visible.

At present, the new accreditation criteria to be applied by the national agency in charge are being agreed upon. This agency is discussing changes in the evaluation procedures of the projects, and a new constitutional order for the country will be decided in 2022. Will all this result in changes in the regulatory rules and a reduction in the adaptive behavior of the scientific population with respect to international regulation? Some heated debates suggest that this will be the case. However, the entanglement and effectiveness of the institutional assembly that supports the current regulatory mechanism makes permanence more likely. The future direction, whatever it may be, will be defined in the next coming years.