We can't find the internet
Attempting to reconnect
Something went wrong!
Hang in there while we get back on track
Shifts in research priorities in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) during COVID-19 times
Summary
Researchers analyzed how COVID-19 shifted research priorities in Latin America and the Caribbean, examining how the pandemic redirected scientific capacity toward virus characterization, diagnostic development, therapeutics, epidemiological tracking, and public health communication across the region.
Science has, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, never looked so important to the everyday lives of people everywhere. The characterization of the virus; development of tests for infection; therapeutics to reduce the severity of the disease; information infrastructure to track the spreading; use of epidemiological models to predict the consequences of interventions; and the development of vaccines—all are dependent on scientific expertise and capability. Most countries have benefited from the pre-existence of a strong scientific and technical research base to this pandemic. The scientific community in LAC also responded massively to the pandemic. Between 2020-2021 COVID-19 related papers represented 6% of all COVID-19 related research in the World and between 2 and 3% of total scientific output (all areas) in the region. Before 2020, we could only identify in WoS 135 papers related to “coronavirus” by LAC authors. In 2020-2021 we identified 5302 COVID-19 related publications in WoS (40x more). In comparison, the topic with the second highest growth rate between 2018-2019 and 2020-2021 is “Microplastics” which increased 109% (1x) between periods. We identified the 141 researchers from LAC that were very prolific (5 or more pubs) in publishing COVID-19 related research publications in 2020-2021 and represented around 14% of total COVID-19 in the region. Overall, we found that the research areas where the most productive COVID-19 LAC researchers came from were highly related and relevant for COVID-19 (e.g. “Virology - Tropical Diseases”, “Assisted Ventilation”, “Immunology”, and “HIV”). This indicates that, as expected, when a new crisis emerges the scholars better able to produce new knowledge related to an emergent issue are the ones closer to the research space of that new research area. We found some exceptions that made large switches in their research areas (e.g. “Sports Science”, “Obstetrics & Gynecology”), which also reveals that the scientific community has sufficient flexibility to shift attention rapidly to major issues if there are clear incentives. Most of these switches were done without significantly sacrificing research effort on other research areas. Some notable exceptions include “Sports Science”, “Assisted Ventilation” and “Stem Cell Research”, that loss more than 25% of their publications in 2018- 2019.