The Scientific Productivity and the Dynamics of Self-organizing Networks: Ibero-American and Caribbean Countries (1966–2013)

We analyse the productivity of academic knowledge in all fields of science within Ibero-American and Caribbean countries between 1966 and 2013. We provide the growth constants for the number of publications (ρ), the number of publications per million inhabitants (σ) and the ratio between the number of publications and the GDP per capita (λ) for 30 countries. We generalise a mathematical model developed by the author to explain the dynamics of co-authorship networks. We show that the evolution of the self-organising scientific networks depends on the mathematical function, which describes the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers against time. We test the generalised model with 25 co-authorship networks related with the major regional producers (Spain, Brazil, Portugal, Mexico and Argentina) between 1973 and 2013. The obtained values for the determination coefficients (R 2 ) between the number of co-publications and the curves predicted by the generalised model show excellent fittings (in 72 % of the cases, R 2 > 0.99; in 16 %, R 2 > 0.98; in 8 %, R 2 > 0.97 and within the remaining 4 %, R 2 > 0.96).