Trends: Lost Science in the Third World; August 1995; Scientific American Magazine; by Gibbs; 8 Page(s)

Luis Ben.tez-Bribiesca waxes nostalgic as he recalls the early years of Archivos de Investigaci.n M.dica, the Mexican medical journal of which he is now editor in chief. Soon after the publication was founded in 1970, the Institute for Scientific Information, a private firm in Philadelphia, agreed to include the journal in its Science Citation Index. The SCI lists articles from roughly 3,300 scientific journals selected from the more than 70,000 that are published worldwide. Inclusion in the SCI and a few other top databases guarantees that a journal's articles will be seen when scientists search the literature for new discoveries in their field and decide which previous work to cite in their own papers.

Of course, there were conditions: to remain in the SCI, Archivos had to publish its issues on time, provide English abstracts for its Spanish articles--and purchase a $10,000 subscription to the index. All of which the journal did, until 1982. "But then the country went through a terrible economic crisis, resulting in a delay of publication for six months," Ben.tez recalls. Although the editors explained the situation to ISI and pleaded with its managers for patience, "they couldn't care less," he says. "We were out of the database."