Ramos Zincke (2014) Local and Global Communication

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Current Sociology2014, Vol. 62(5) 704722

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DOI: 10.1177/0011392114521374

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Local and globalcommunications in Chileansocial science: Inequality andrelative autonomy

Claudio Ramos ZinckeUniversidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile

Abstract

This article analyzes the connections of the social sciences in Chile with the knowledgeproduced in central countries in comparison to those established within Chile and

with other Latin American countries, paying particular attention to the connectionsregarding theory. It is based on content analysis of academic publications, and on social

network analysis applied to a database of more than 20,000 bibliographical referencesgenerated for this research project from the universe of investigations published byChilean social scientists over a period of seven years in the first decade of this century,

in journals and books, both in Chile and abroad. The results show that, regardinginternational communications, there is a low level of connectivity with other LatinAmerican countries, but that the communications among Chilean authors are relatively

important and particularly those with a group of local theorists who occupy centralpositions in the network. This does not appear to be a pattern of cognitive dependence

although it occurs within the context of a global science that is characterized by a

remarkable inequality.

Keywords

Citation, cognitive dependence, scientific communication, scientific regulation, social

network, social science

Corresponding author:

Claudio Ramos Zincke, Department of Sociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Cienfuegos 46, Santiago,

Chile.

Email: [email protected]

CSI0010.1177/0011392114521374Current SociologyRamosZinckeresearch-article2014

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Ramos Zincke 705

The objective of this article is to analyze the connections of the social sciences in Chile,

a Latin American semi-peripheral country, with the knowledge produced in central coun-

tries in comparison with those established within Chile and with other Latin American

countries, paying particular attention to the connections regarding theory. This is dis-

cussed in the horizon of concerns for scientific regulatory and evaluative mechanismsand their effects on peripheral or semi-peripheral countries like Chile. Such mechanisms

create a notable separation between central science and marginal science. According to

some authors, together with this separation is established a relationship of intellectual or

cognitive dependency, or a colonialism of knowledge (Connell, 2007; Lander, 2004;

Mignolo, 2003, 2004). However, when the whole of the body of knowledge produced in

the social sciences and the communications established by the scientists of these periph-

eral or semi-peripheral countries are examined and not merely the sub-set selected by

the devices of the core countries is studied the situation is more blurred and the depend-

ency relationship becomes much less evident; there is a play of local and global relation-ships that is much more complex, wherein dependency and autonomy superimpose

themselves. From such perspective, this article seeks to provide some empirical elements

for the discussion of the thesis of cognitive dependence based on the study of the particu-

lar case of Chile.

With that objective, in the following sections: (1) I review the stratified construction

of the social sciences at the international level and the devices that shape it, including the

role of local scientific institutionality and I pay attention to the interpretation made of

this as a situation of cognitive dependence; (2) I describe the methodology used for the

empirical research; (3) I analyze the distribution pattern of local and international com-munications of the social sciences in Chile, (4) giving special consideration to the con-

nections with theorists; and (5) I arrive at conclusions regarding local and global scientific

communications and the possible condition of cognitive dependence.

Building central science, the mechanisms for its

production and its effects in Latin America

Science, in all its areas, has had a transnational orientation since its beginnings with

modernity, gathering knowledge from diverse parts of the world and it has claimed theuniversality of the knowledge generated although in practice there has been a clear

predominance of the knowledge originating in the central countries, without a proper

validation in other places of the world. This predominance is strengthened by the pecu-

liar characteristics of the devices employed in recent decades to select and to regulate

scientific production.

Together with the advances made in defining methodological procedures for evaluat-

ing and proving its hypothetical statements, science has had to design institutional mech-

anisms for communicating, evaluating and selecting scientific communications. The first

printed bibliography a register of about 10,000 books was made in 1545, and putting

it together took years of work (Burke, 2002). The publication in journals of the results of

scientific undertakings began in 1665. The scientific societies and academies that arose

during the 17th century were crucial for the invention of the scientific journal, the use of

which began to expand as a communication medium in replacement of the letters,

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706 Current Sociology 62(5)

treatises and books which were the common way of communication until then. The first

two journals appeared in 1665, one in England the famousPhilosophical Transactions

and another in France (Merton, 1973). The generalized practice of using footnotes

comes from the 17th century (Burke, 2002) and only in the 19th century did the format

of scientific papers become more or less established and generally adopted, including thepeer review system and the standardization and general usage of the academic apparatus

of notes and quotes (Merton, 1973). Scientific societies, congresses, academic journals,

the peer review system and bibliographic references are some of the procedures taken for

granted today but that have only gradually been refined and stabilized over four

centuries.

Following the Second World War, at a time of tremendous growth in scientific activ-

ity, a last great device appeared that would have powerful effects on the structure of

global science in the decades to come: the bibliometric register of articles and authors,

and of the quotes that refer to them in a body of journals selected as being the bestknown. It is a device supported by the mechanisms already operative in a scientific jour-

nal, particularly the bibliographical references and the peer review procedure, and by a

prestige structure that had taken form and was recognized in some fields of science.

There were several other trials attempted previously, but the Scientific Citation Index

(SCI), developed by Eugene Garfield in the US, finally imposed itself around 1961. It

was based on an automated procedure that does away with human classification, and was

managed by a private institution with commercial aims, the Institute for Scientific

Information (ISI). Originally concentrating on the biomedical field, it rapidly expanded

to involve other disciplines, and in 1972 the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)appeared. Garfields institute would be bought in 1992 by Thomson Business Information

(now Thomson Reuters), another private and multinational corporation, based in Canada

and the US, that strengthened the services provided by the index and moved its operation

onto the Internet, multiplying its earnings (De Bellis, 2009). These indexes became the

main tools for regulating science around the world, being the main ways to manage the

relevance of the articles and the levels of prestige of scientists, enjoying an undisputed

preeminence through the end of the 20th century. They are an answer to the enormous

proliferation of publications, which would become unmanageable both for the scientific

community and other users of scientific information if they could not rely on these filter-ing and ranking mechanisms of published literature.

When these indexes were put together, there was no great effort made to achieve

within them a representation of the various regions of the world. Selection was made

with a view towards the central countries, and particularly from an Anglo-Saxon point

of view. This is reflected in the predominance of the English language: between 1998

and 2007, 94.5% of the articles in the SSCI were written English, and only 0.4% in

Spanish, for example (Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson, 2011). This involves the benefit

of having a lingua francafor science but it has an asymmetrical cost for access (Ammon,

2011). As regards regional representativeness, during the 1970s there was next to no

presence of Latin America or Asia. There was only one journal from Chile among all of

the scientific disciplines. In later years there has been an effort to increase the diversity

of origins, but despite all of that, there is still a great concentration. In 2010, the US and

Europe were the source of 84.3% of all of the journals included in the SCCI, with 49.5%



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Ramos Zincke 707

from the US, 23.7% from the United Kingdom and fewer than 3% from Latin America

(Rodrguez, 2010).

In 2004, the Elsevier publishing company based in Europe (Amsterdam) launched a

new database and citations index, Scopus, which broke the monopoly of the North

American Thomson Scientific.1At the same time, other more open search engines likeGoogle Scholar gained relevance. This caused an overall increase of the number of pub-

lications included in these indexes, although Scopus, with its commercial outlook, the

greatest change that produced was the increase in the proportion of European publica-

tions (Gudon, 2011).

These indexes and citation databases that mix the selectivity characteristic of pre-

existent scientific recognition with the selectivity criteria that arise from the geopolitical

and sociocultural positions of those who construct the index, provide orientation for the

searching and reading of scientists and for the making of institutional decisions, particu-

larly those of librarians in purchasing scientific publications (Vessuri, 2008). They gen-erate a collective Matthew effect, not only referring to the most visible authors who are

recognized as prestigious, as described by Merton (1973), but also referring to visible

journals recognized as prestigious. As a result of their selection in the index they concen-

trate the preferences for publication and reading, to the detriment of others that are not

included. This produces a massive ratification of the privileged status of these journals.

The initial qualification of the journals is self-validated. Those that are included, and

thereby made visible, are more frequently cited, and those that are excluded and there-

fore less visible do not attract submissions for publication or citations, at least not as a

consequence of the effect propagated worldwide that the index produces. Even more, theexclusion extends to entire regional clusters of journals and the sub-representation

becomes consolidated, resulting in a configuration of a global science that is markedly

associated with the central countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon countries, as a per-

formative effect of the mechanisms registering publications and citations. SSCI and

Scopus shape this central science; the very make-up of the devices and the way they

operate cause this shaping to stabilize and reproduce itself.

Since the 1990s, as a reaction against this scientific marginalization, several indexes

and journal databases have been created in Latin America: Redalyc, Latindex and Scielo.

They try to articulate and increase the visibility of the regional production in the socialsciences. Scielo, also including Spain and Portugal, promoted by the Brazilian govern-

ment, is the index that has achieved the greatest recognition from the academic world. In

second place is Latindex, which operates from Mexico and is chosen above all for its

most demanding version: Latindex Catlogo (Gudon, 2011; Rodrguez, 2010).

The scientific institutions in Chile, in the area of the social sciences, have assigned

full validity to the central indexes, especially to the SSCI, commonly referred to as ISI,

and to Scopus, assuming them as objective and unquestionable standards of quality.

Scielo is recognized as belonging to a secondary category and Latindex to a third rank

category. The National Council for Science and Technology (Conicyt), which is the pri-

mary source of government support for research in the social sciences, currently defines

that a requirement for the approval of a research project proposal is the achievement of

at least one ISI publication. In 2007 Conicyt imposed this condition, whereas before it

had only been a recommendation.2Furthermore, within the competition among social



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science research projects, operated by Conicyt, researchers receives almost three times

as many qualifying points for an ISI or a Scopus publication than for a Scielo publica-

tion, points that are often decisive factors in the overall approval decision. And it is

worthwhile pointing out that Chile has a very limited number of ISI journals: none in

sociology, one in political science and two in anthropology, which undoubtedly putspressure on people to publish abroad. On the other hand, some of the better recognized

and most read journals in Chile are neither ISI nor Scielo indexed. This is the case of

Estudios Pblicos, which in a survey that I applied among 37 outstanding researchers of

the national academic world, was considered to be the most highly valued journal. In

spite of this fact, in the competition for project funding, it receives a third or fewer points

than a publication in an ISI or Scopus journal.

Something similar occurs with the evaluations made in the country of the institutional

productivity at universities or other scientific centers.3The most frequently used indica-

tor for ranking and making comparisons is the number of ISI publications. As a conse-quence, an increasing number of universities, particularly new private universities,

founded since the 1980s, are now offering economic incentives for achieving that type of

publications, with amounts of money that, in some cases, are close to a months salary,

being extremely attractive, given the tight economic situation of scholars in Chile. Some

universities include this kind of incentive for Scielo publications, repeating the stratified

pattern, by offering sums that are between half and one-third of those offered for ISI

articles. Furthermore, these publications, especially those in ISI, are considered to be a

privileged indicator of individual productivity and so they influence professional

advancement. In that way, Chilean scientific institutions themselves, wherein the veryresearchers participate, promote the reproduction of this stratified structure of a central

social science, more highly valued, and a peripheral science.

What, then, are the effects of this structuring of global science, and the way of embed-

ding Chilean social sciences in it? It is clearly a type of communication that has been

established on a foundation of inequality, for which the rules for the selection of journals

are set by scientific regulatory corporations located in the central countries and the selec-

tion of articles is defined by evaluators who are principally from those same countries.

Local social science competes at a disadvantage, and nor do its local academic institu-

tions stimulate, as we have seen, publication in local journals, no matter how well quali-fied they are.

When we look at scientific communications from the point of view of the databases

and indexes of centralized science, the following results emerge (see Table 1). Scientific

production in Latin America barely exists for the central countries: Europe and the US

make fewer than 1% of their citations to authors from that region. For its part, Latin

America orientates 90.1% of its references to those countries, a situation that is repeated

in Asia and Oceania. This is to say, if we make an evaluation on the basis of the exchange,

then we have a total imbalance.

Can it be concluded from this that there is a cognitive or intellectual dependence? Is

this a matter of coloniality of knowledge? Over the past decades, a thread of critical

thought has appeared regarding epistemic or cognitive dependency (Mignolo, 2004), the

colonial nature of knowledge (Lander, 2004) and, in general, about the problem of the

relationships between the central and the peripheral countries as regards the generation



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Ramos Zincke 709

of knowledge (Alatas, 2003; Burawoy et al., 2010; Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003, 2004;UNESCO, 2011). From this point of view, the problem is the excessive and inappropriate

use of theoretical and conceptual categories generated in the central countries, without

giving the necessary attention to their coincidence with local realities in the peripheral

countries, and without a local production able to generate its own stream of knowledge,

which could develop a cognitive relation, on an equal standing, with the core countries,

and, furthermore, which could overcome the marginality of autochthonous currents of

thought.

Although science supports itself upon a global accumulation of knowledge and has an

inherent pretension of universality, in the social sciences, local references are extremelyimportant, in a way that is not present in other scientific disciplines. In this regard, all the

social science disciplines involve important and meaningful configurations of knowl-

edge associated to local areas (e.g., sociological knowledge about France, political sci-

ence knowledge of certain realities of the United States, and so on). Even in the field of

economics, which certainly has a self-image of being global, some of its theoretical

constructs and statements contain marked national differences, as shown with conspicu-

ous precision in the study made by Fourcade (2009) that compares the USA, the UK and

France; the flags of the universal nature of knowledge, so ardently waved by economists,

cause those differences to pass unnoticed. Such cognitive differences are associated withthe peculiar characteristics of the institutions that deal with the production and transmis-

sion of knowledge, and with their ways of entanglement with the rest of society.

To analyze the situation of cognitive dependence in a particular country, like Chile,

my assertion is that it is not adequate to judge the direction of scientific communications

and to ponder the possible cognitive dependence with regard to the central countries by

limiting our observation to what happens in the central indexes and citation databases. It

needs to be taken into account that this Latin American social science, which makes

fewer than 10% of its references to Latin American countries (Gingras and Mosbah-

Natanson, 2011), represents but a small fraction of the social science production in thisregion, and that the authors of this group, selected by central indexes, are precisely those

involved in establishing a dialogue with the production of the central countries. So it is

necessary that we analyze what is going on with the rest of the national production.

Table 1. The orientation of the social science citations worldwide, 20032005 (in the 200most cited journals, in percentages).

Country or region making the reference

USA Europe Latin America

Countryor regionreferred to

USA 78.1 47.9 56.2

Europe 20.4 50.3 33.9

Latin America 0.2 0 6.9

Rest of the world 1.3 1.8 3.0

100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: SSCI, Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson (2011).



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That is what I shall do here with regard to Chile. I choose this country to examine

ideas about cognitive dependence. In global economic and power relations, Chile,

although subordinate to core countries, has an intermediate position and has been consid-

ered a semi-peripheral country (Babones and Alvarez-Rivadulla, 2007). It can be sug-

gested that the results found regarding Chile could be hypothetically extended to othersemi-peripheral countries, at least from the region, such as Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay.

I will analyze, then, what direction scientific communications take when we base our

analysis on the universe of social scientific production being generated in the country,

and how strong the orientation is towards the central countries as opposed to the orienta-

tion towards Chile itself and the Latin American region.

As part of this analysis and by paying attention to the assertions about cognitive

dependence, I also question what is happening regarding theory. Theory is at the very

center of the making of scientific observation and of the way reality is interpreted and

explained. So I seek to identify the sources of theory used in the country in terms of thetheorists referred to by national researchers and with whom they establish a dialogue in

their publications and who are the most central theorists in the field. At the same time,

I ask if there are local theorists who are relevant within the network of theoretical con-

nections. Once that has been analyzed, the question is what the findings have to say

about the eventuality of cognitive dependence.

Methodology

For this analysis of the scientific communications as observed from the Chilean fielditself, I have taken three basic disciplines of the social sciences: sociology, which has

achieved notable progress in becoming established institutionally in this country during

the 1960s; political science, at first with strong links with and dependence upon sociol-

ogy but gradually consolidating its own institutionality since the 1980s; and anthropol-

ogy, which made early progress in the country, at the beginning of the 20th century,

although its institutionalization and development have been slower (Fuentes and Santana,

2005; Garretn, 2005; Palestini et al., 2010; Ramos, 2005; Ramos and Canales, 2009;

Rehren, 2005). Economics was not included because for Chilean scientists, at least in the

period studied, it is conceived as a separated field, whereas sociology, political scienceand anthropology are viewed as part of the same field. This is similar in the social sci-

ences of other Latin American countries (Trindade, 2007). The discipline of economics,

with all the complexities involved, would require its own research.

Research into scientific communications has habitually considered only articles pub-

lished in journals, because of their accessibility. This is valid in sciences like chemistry

or biology, where most of the results of research effectively appear in journal articles, but

in the social sciences, the pattern of publications is different. In particular, sociology has

been a culture of the book, as indicated by Clemens et al. (1995) writing about the US,

and there are estimates that suggest that between 40% and 60% of the literature of the

social sciences is comprised of books (Archambault and Larivire, 2011: 264). So, in

order to avoid distortion, I have included all the formats that are relevant to social scien-

tific knowledge dissemination in the country: books, book chapters, journal articles and

publicly available working papers.



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Ramos Zincke 711

I concentrated attention on publications that make up the core of scientific activity:

publications that report research results, which is to say those that involve the generation of

new knowledge through systematic research, empirical or theoretical. Therefore, I have

excluded book reviews and opinion pieces, and texts that do not meet the minimal require-

ments for selection in a social science journal of recognized quality. To select a text, itsauthor or at least one of the authors, in the cases of multiple authors should have under-

graduate or graduate education in one of the three aforementioned disciplines. I included

not only researchers who were Chilean citizens, but also those who were residents in Chile

during the period of study and who were active participants in their disciplines.

The research tried to cover the universe of texts that fulfilled the requirements men-

tioned and that were published between 2000 and 2006. The research team gave special

attention to gathering material produced outside of the central metropolitan region, and

we traveled to regional centers looking for texts. We also reviewed a variety of series of

working papers and institutional publications, both private and public, and from interna-tional organizations located in Chile, and we requested texts from those researchers who

might have copies of those that we were unable to locate. Regarding publications made

in foreign journals, we reviewed ISI and Scielo social science journals, and looked for

Chilean authors who wrote in them. All of this was a demanding effort made to achieve

a maximum coverage, so that those texts that were finally not identified nor found would

have to represent a very small fraction of the whole body of work, and there are no rea-

sons for thinking that there was any bias involved in their being excluded; their distribu-

tion must be random. The final corpus comprised 479 texts.

With two other researchers, we read each text, reviewed it and made its characteriza-tion based on a variety of features, one of which, pertinent to this article, was the intended

destination of knowledge. We determined the principal destination for the knowledge

generated considering what was said explicitly in the texts themselves and through infer-

ences based on available data.

Furthermore, we recorded all the bibliographical references contained in each text.

After long and very time-consuming work, we obtained a total of 21,787 bibliographic

references, and we specified all of the characteristics of each one.

Among the references we distinguished those that cite theorists, understood as authors

whose work reaches sufficient levels of abstraction and generalization articulating ahypothetical argumentation with sufficient coherence, consistency and originality. To

study the connections with theorists and the networks that involve them we applied

social network analysis (Degenne and Fors, 2004; Scott, 2000; Wasserman and Faust,

1994). Using the logic of co-citation analysis we considered that a connection between

two theoretical authors occurs when they are both cited in the same text of the corpus

(Gmr, 2003).4

Local and global dimensions of social science in Chile

Table 2 presents the distribution of the publications effectively found and studied,

according to discipline of the authors and format of the publication. These figures con-

firm the importance of books in Chile as media for transmitting knowledge in the social

sciences, especially in sociology. This reveals the degree of distortion that may result



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from an analysis of publications in the social sciences that does not take this format intoaccount. The book is a cognitive product with manifestly different characteristics and

with capabilities that an article has not, that are outstanding in the field of the social sci-

ences. In order to include descriptive stories and explanations of some complexity in

society, with an integrative aim, supported by an adequately developed line of argument

and backed up by a store of empirical material, a journal article is insufficient. There are

numerous works in the social sciences that have made considerable impact in Chile that

have been published as books. I can mention: Chile: The Anatomy of a Myth, by Toms

Moulian; Chilean Identity, by Jorge Larran; The Paradoxes of Modernization, by the

UNDP; Culture and Modernization in Latin America, by Pedro Morand; and TheShadows of the Future, by Norbert Lechner. The impact achieved by such works would

be unimaginable in the format of a journal article. One cannot find journal articles of

comparable levels of impact. On the one hand, those formulations are not condensable

into the tight space allowed for an article; and on the other, academic journals in Chile

are of a very restricted level of circulation within the academy and they are not generally

able to attract a public from outside academia.

Of the total of the texts found, only 7.6% had been published abroad. One might sup-

pose that it is basically over this small group that the central countries would have exer-

cised an influence in defining their research agenda. Of these texts, located in the sphereof central science, a few also occupied positions of relevance in national publications and

citations, whereas the others were located in a second line of citations and recognition.

On the other hand, nearly half of the most frequently cited authors in the country have

not been published abroad. That is to say, in the social sciences, international prestige

does not coincide with national prestige. Something peculiar to those who are better

players of the international game is that most of them have relationships with institutions

in the central countries, which facilitates their maintenance of personal contacts and a

physical presence in those countries, and not merely a connection by way of their pub-

lished writing.

To appraise the relative importance of local and global dimensions of Chilean social

science, the analysis of the distribution of bibliographic references provides us with a

measure of the degree of attention that social scientists give to local production of

knowledge either to the national or to Latin American production in contrast with

Table 2. Distribution of publications by format and discipline (in percentages).

Format TOTAL Disciplines

Sociology Political science Anthropology

Journal article 42.4 34.0 52.1 53.8

Book or book chapter 35.9 45.2 23.6 25.5

Working paper or similar format 21.7 20.8 24.3 20.8

100.0(479)

100.0(268)

100.0(165)

100.0(106)

Note: In some cases, there have been multiple authors and a text was classified in more than one discipline,so the total of the articles by discipline is greater than the sum of the articles.



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Ramos Zincke 713

the attention given to knowledge generated in the central countries; this allows us to

determine the direction textual communications take. Thus, we have classified the

21,787 identified references according to the cited authors country. The categories

applied are: (1) Chile; (2) other Latin American country; (3) the USA (and Canada,

although there are few references to this country); (4) the UK (mainly England ); (5)France; (6) Germany; (7) Spain; (8) other European country (Belgium, Italy, Poland,

Austria, Sweden, etc.); (9) other country (India, Japan, Israel, China, Australia,

Singapore, etc.); (10) several countries for the same reference or unidentifiable country.

The resulting distribution of the references is presented in Table 3, which also groups

them according to the discipline of the researcher making the citation.

It can be observed that Chilean social science shows a clear local vector: 42.6% of the

references cite Chilean authors and allude to discussions about the country. There is a

clear orientation to the social problems that are of local concern: social inequality, pov-

erty, educational problems, the evaluation of public policy, social movements, gender,

etc. and the knowledge generated has a significant orientation towards local audiences.

If we consider the destination for which the work was intended, apart from the aca-

demic community itself, the other large destination for knowledge is the state. About

40% of all the production of the three disciplines studied has that destination, whether

because of demands coming from the state itself, or because they are the initiative of

other institutions universities, non-governmental organizations or international

organizations which seek to influence in the definition of policies, programs or other

governmental decisions. Sociology, particularly, demonstrates a strong connection

with the state apparatus: nearly half of its production is interconnected with the state

or oriented in its direction. Governmental organisms such as the National Institute for

Table 3. Distribution by country of the bibliographic references, according to the discipline of

the citing author (distribution of the cited authors, in percentages).Country of origin ofauthor cited

Discipline of the citing Chilean author TOTAL

Sociology Political science Anthropology

Chile 44.6 39.2 43.2 42.6

Other Latin Americancountry

10.7 10.2 12.7 10.8

USA/Canada 14.1 27.8 11.9 18.5

UK 4.6 6.0 5.3 5.2

France 5.6 2.7 7.0 4.8Germany 6.3 4.0 4.2 5.3

Spain 5.6 4.5 7.4 5.5

Other European country 3.0 3.8 2.6 3.2

Other country 0.4 0.8 0.6 0.6

Several or unidentifiedcountries

5.0 1.0 5.1 3.6

TOTAL 100.0(11,582)

100.0(7369)

100.0(2836)

100.0(21,787)



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Youth (INJUV) or the National Service for Women (SERNAM) are frequently demand-

ing social science research. On the other hand, 18% of the production is oriented

towards civil society entities (social movements, NGOs, political parties, etc.).

As we see in Table 3, the international or global direction is also very important in the

communications Chilean social scientists made. Particularly important are those com-munications that have to do with the production of the central countries (42.5% of all the

references), the USA appearing as the main pole of attraction.

Comparing disciplines, political science appears as the most focused on the global

orientation: 48.8% of its references are made to central countries (vs. 39.2% from sociol-

ogy and 38.2% from social anthropology). In this discipline also noteworthy is the

greater relative importance assumed by the US. It is, moreover, the discipline in which

the members have a greater number of publications in foreign journals. Thus, political

science is the discipline that now appears to be the most internationalized.5

The regional dimension references to knowledge generated within Latin America has a reduced presence: only 10.8%. The field of social science in Chile shows little

interest in Latin American production. We do not have comparative information for peri-

ods in the past for Chile, but I would think that the proportion of references made to Latin

America has been decreasing since 1970s, when there was much more attention to the

region. In fact, according to an analysis for the entire region, using the SSCI database,

the citations from Latin American authors to other Latin Americans have been declining

in number: in the period 19931995 they corresponded to 11.7% of total citations, while

between 2003 and 2005 this figure dropped to 6.9%, giving way to a greater proportion

of connections with the US and Europe (Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson, 2011).Regarding the inequality between central science and regional science derived from the

operation of indexing and ranking systems, the variety of forms of pressure and institutional

incentives that place greater value on the central standards determined by ISI and Scopus

have been turning researchers towards the publications that are blessed by said indexes, and

that seems to be setting the future tendency. In the case of sociology, during the decade of

the 1990s the average of ISI publications was 1.5 articles per year (Faras, 2004); in the

period 20102012 the rate is 15.3 by year (Web of Science). The Scielo and Latindex

Catlogo publications have also increased in number but well below that rate of growth.

The strong institutional preference for prioritizing ISI publications can increasinglytilt the balance towards global connections, especially Anglo-Saxon. In fact, in ISI arti-

cles the references to national authors are substantially lower, still much lower than those

in books, book chapters and articles with Scielo or Latindex indexing, or articles without

indexing.

This value given to the central standards, which leads scientists to seek publication at

the international level, especially in English, causing negative impacts on national jour-

nals and the publication of books, is constantly being criticized by scholars and local

authorities, but universities and scientific institutions apply those standards of evaluation

because they are broadly legitimized and have become part of the rules of the game.

The structure of communications with theorists

To investigate the connections with theorists, I began by reviewing the existence of

references to a list of 120 internationally recognized theorists, and found that, from the



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Ramos Zincke 715

Table 4. Internationally renowned theorists most cited in the field (the top 25, inpercentages).

Author Country Discipline of the citing researcher TOTAL

Sociology Politicalscience

Anthropology

1 Luhmann, Niklas Germany 11.9 (1) 0.5 13.2 (2) 9.4

2 Bourdieu, Pierre France 7.0 (3) 1.0 16.5 (1) 6.9

3 Giddens, Anthony England 7.1 (2) 2.7 7.4 (4) 6.1

4 Habermas, Jrgen Germany 6.6 (4) 4.4 6.6 (5) 6.1

5 Beck, Ulrich Germany 6.3 (5) 1.7 3.3 4.8

6 Foucault, Michel France 2.7 2.4 8.7 (3) 3.5

7 Touraine, Alain France 4.5 1.5 0.8 3.3

8 Garca Canclini,Nstor

Argentina 3.1 0.2 5.4 2.8

9 Mainwaring, Scott USA 0.1 11.2 (1) 0.0 2.710 Weber, Max Germany 2.7 3.7 0.4 2.6

11 Sartori, Giovanni Italy 1.0 5.9 0.0 2.0

12 Bauman, Zygmunt Poland /England

2.4 1.5 0.8 2.0

13 Huntington, Samuel USA 0.5 6.8 (3) 0.0 2.0

14 Parsons, Talcott USA 2.9 0.2 0.0 1.9

15 Lipset, Seymour USA 0.0 7.8 (2) 0.0 1.8

16 Maturana,Humberto

Chile 2.0 0.0 3.7 1.8

17 ODonnell,Guillermo

Argentina 0.7 5.6 0.0 1.8

18 Castel, Robert France 1.6 1.0 2.1 1.5

19 Nohlan, Dieter Germany 0.2 6.1 (4) 0.0 1.5

20 Geertz, Clifford USA 1.0 0.0 5.8 1.4

21 Lijphart, Arend Holland 0.1 5.9 (5) 0.0 1.4

22 Martn-Barbero,Jess

Spain /Colombia

2.2 0.0 0.0 1.4

23 Marx, Karl Germany 1.7 0.7 0.0 1.3

24 Castoriadies,

Cornelius

Greece /

France

1.5 0.5 1.7 1.3

25 Willke, Helmut Germany 1.9 0.0 0.0 1.2

(1092) (409) (242) (1743)

total of 21,787 bibliographic references, 10% were referred to them: 11.4% in sociol-

ogy, 7.5% in political science and 10.5% in anthropology.6There were 50 theorists who

got more than 10 references in the whole field, but in each discipline about 40% of

references were concentrated on five main authors (52.4% in anthropology, 39.9% in

sociology and 37.8% in political science). See Table 4, which presents the 25 most citedauthors in the field.



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There are strong similarities between sociology and anthropology regarding the

authors with the highest quantities of citations; of the top five in each discipline, four are

matched. Political science, in contrast, markedly differs from that pattern of authors.

Sociology and anthropology are dominated by the big theorists (Bourdieu, Luhmann,

Habermas, Giddens), while in political science middle-range theorists are emphasized,authors that are more closely tied to empirical research on the basis of which they estab-

lish abstract generalizations (Mainwaring, Lipset, Huntington, etc.). Moreover, while in

sociology and anthropology the major countries of origin of the theorists are European

Germany, France and England in political science, the USA dominates: the three

most cited authors in this discipline are of US origin.

Among the most cited theorists only 12% are of Latin American origin or have had

prolonged stays in the region and show a close relationship with it: Garca Canclini,

Maturana, ODonnell, Martn-Barbero, Germani, Cardoso, Laclau, and Hinkelammert.

One of them Maturana additionally, is not properly a social scientist and does notmake a reflection focused on the social reality of Latin America. Laclau, meanwhile,

despite being born in Argentina and concerned with the analysis of his native country,

has developed most of his work primarily in the central countries. This low figure of 12%

would ratify the pattern of a division of work in which the theory is basically produced

in the central countries. The theoretical production from the region is secondarily

reported, so that the theoretical connection is primarily established with the central coun-

tries, in what could be understood as a pattern of cognitive dependency.

All of the above notwithstanding, and although the dominance of the central countries

in terms of the development of theory in the field of social science is quite clear, a reviewof the national production permits us to identify a group of Chilean authors who are fre-

quently cited; and even though they are not recognized as international-level theorists,

they have developed abstract arguments of some generality that have achieved a signifi-

cant level of diffusion within national borders and additionally extending their ideas, in

some cases, to other Latin American countries. We could say that they are local theo-

rists or, more precisely, authors doing theoretical work, since they do not focus entirely

on theory and are not generally recognized as theorists. In this group we considered, due

to being the most cited: Eugenio Tironi, Jos Joaqun Brunner, Norbet Lechner, Toms

Moulian, Jorge Larran, Sonia Montecinos, Pedro Morand, Fernando Robles and OscarGodoy, as ranked according to the number of citations.

If we include these authors in the total group of theorists, they receive 16.8% of all

theoretical references. Although a low proportion, it is not negligible and may have influ-

ence in the national process of generation of knowledge. Whether it actually has this

influence or not is the next question, whose answer I seek to advance using network

analysis. I ask, then, how these producers of knowledge, these local theorists, connect

with theorists from the North and how central or peripheral are their positions in the

resulting theoretical network of the field. For this I appeal to the logic of co-citation

analysis. I consider 73 authors, a sum of 64 international and those nine local authors.

The network analysis applied allows identifying a grouping of central authors such as

Habermas, some others at a clearly peripheral position such as Jon Elster, Harold

Garfinkel and Chantal Mouffe, and a third set in an intermediate position, like Norberto

Bobbio or Richard Sennett. At the center are the greatest theorists: along with one of the



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Ramos Zincke 717

classics Weber there is a group of authors of the second half of the 20th century:

Habermas, Bourdieu, Luhmann, Giddens and Foucault. But also, closely intertwined

with them, are several of the local theorists, prominently Moulian, Larran, Brunner,

Lechner and Tironi. Analyzing the networks separately by discipline, this situation is

repeated: in sociology, Moulian occupies a position of great centrality in the theoreticalnetwork; in political science, Lechner and Tironi have such a position; and in the field of

anthropology Montecinos and Lechner are the central authors, constituting Lechner an

exceptional case of a political scientist cited by the anthropologists, making him one of

the most prominent brokers in the whole field.

Conclusions

When observed with a global perspective, considering the results of central indexing

platforms, the data reveal a strong divide between central and peripheral social sciences.However, when the relations between local social science and global science are observed

from the point of view of the local space of a particular dependent and semi-peripheral

country, Chile, the picture is more balanced than when observed from the perspective of

the central indexing devices. One sees a body of social science that deals intensively with

local situations and requirements, with extensive connections among local authors;

although, on the other hand, paying special attention to what central scientific production

could provide.

The great relevance of the references made to the theorists of central countries is

unquestionable and, in that sense, Chile is part, to a large degree, of the internationaldivision of labor, in which theoretical production is being realized principally in the core

countries. Nevertheless, there is also a group of local authors who do creative work

elaborating abstract propositions, of a theoretical nature, referring fundamentally to local

reality, who are frequently cited, and who are strongly intermingled with the interna-

tional theorists (as confirmed by the co-citation analysis). One might say that the use and

assimilation of international theories happens, to a large degree, within this mediating

and translating network. Therefore, to conclude, on the basis of the relevance that the use

of knowledge from the central countries has, that there is a situation of cognitive depend-

ence would be exaggerated or at least an excessively simplified statement. If a centralcharacteristic of cognitive dependence is to use knowledge that is inadequate for the

local reality, which has the imprint from the central countries, without a filter, translation

or criticism (Alatas, 2001, 2003), it could be argued that within this local circle of theo-

retical development such a creative and adaptive process is occurring. As a matter of fact,

a review of the works of said authors leads us to the conclusion that among them such

translation work critical and adaptive is really taking place. These results in the

Chilean case contradict some of the statements made under the idea of cognitive depend-

ence, allowing us to criticize the generalizations made about it and could further discus-

sion of this notion.

An historical review of social science in Chile allows us to confirm that from the

beginning, together with the institutionalization of this way of generating knowledge,

there have been such receptive, adaptive and creative processes (Barrios and Brunner,

1988; Beigel, 2010, 2011; Brunner, 1988; Franco, 2007). The period between 1960 and



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1973 is a conspicuous example in this regard, with a significant production of social sci-

ence knowledge, focused on the local reality and with a profuse use of theories coming

from the central countries (Beigel, 2010).7Around 1980, also, there is a significant theo-

retical elaboration and debate trying to develop ways to analyze the social reality of

Chile under dictatorship. The field of local social science has conserved endogenouscapabilities for generating knowledge, although it is situated within an international

framework of inequality regarding the flow and appreciation of that knowledge.

A matter of concern regarding the observed pattern of global connections is the fact

that the local production is not sufficiently valued and projected on a global level and that

the local institutions do not help to increase its value and international projection, but

rather they place obstacles in the path of its achievement. The problem is this and not the

pronounced utilization of international publications. The central indexes, like SSCI and

Scopus, despite the fact that they began with a definitely local character, referring to

countries like the USA and UK, have defined themselves from the start as global, asrepresenting a science authentically universal, covering the whole world, whereas, in

contrast, the regional indexes of Latin America, like Scielo and Latindex, are conceived

and projected as local, and are used by the countries of the region definitely so in Chile

as second class indexes. In such a way, unintentionally, and despite all of the reiterated

public discourse against the situation of scientific inequality, academic institutions

become an accomplice in maintaining and reproducing the distinction between central

science (coincidental with what is produced in the central countries) and peripheral sci-

ence (correlated with what is produced by the peripheral countries).

Consequently, if there is no change in the central and regional indexation proceduresor in the ranking criteria employed by scientific institutions in Chile, the inequality

between central and peripheral science will remain. On the other hand, the strong empha-

sis given to global science by universities and public funding institutions is a threat to the

current local focus and relative autonomy of the social sciences in this country.

Acknowledgements

I thank Andrea Canales and Stefano Palestini for their valuable collaboration in the research, and

Fernando Valenzuela, Fernanda Beigel and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Funding

This work was part of a research supported by the National Council of Science and Technology of

Chile under Fondecyt grants number 1070814 and 1121124.

Notes

1. For advertising reasons, Thomson currently hosts its products under the name Web of

Science, and Elsevier under the name of Sciverse Scopus.

2. The respective fund for scientific research (Fondecyt) was created in 1982 and throughout

its 30 years of existence has financed more than 15,000 projects, from all disciplines, for atotal of about US$1,500 million. The amounts invested have steadily grown since the late

1980s and since 2006 have had an accelerated growth, so that in 2011 the awarded amounts

where three times larger than the 2005 funds. For its part, the policy of putting ISI publica-

tions as the required standard has had its effects: in the late 2000s, the annual number of ISI



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Ramos Zincke 719

publications more than doubled that of the beginning of the decade and in the period 2007

2011, 23% of all ISI publications in the country came from projects funded by Fondecyt

(Fondecyt, 2012).

3. In Chile there are 59 universities and numerous research centers, however approximately

80% of ISI publications are generated by six universities (Baeza, 2010: 161).4. We do this from a mode-2 network, of texts and theorists, and then we reduce it to a mode-1

of theorists. For this analysis we have used a variety of software programs: ORA, Ucinet and

Pajek.

5. Additionally, within Conicyt, the political science study group is the group that, for evaluat-

ing researchers, gives more qualifying points to ISI publications, well beyond the points given

to Scielo or Latindex publications.

6. The list of theorists includes producers of grand theory, middle-range theories and theoreti-

cal generalizations. There is no difference between positive and negative citations, since all

involve establishing a connection to the respective author, even if it is only to criticize him.

Moreover, the links with critical content are very scarce.7. For a broader and deeper discussion of the relation between autonomy and dependence, see

Beigel (2010), covering the period between 1950 and 1980, referring to Chile and Argentina.

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Author biography

Claudio Ramos Zincke, PhD in sociology, is professor at Alberto Hurtado University, Chile. His

main research interest is the study of science and technology, focused on social sciences in Chile.

Currently, he is investigating the processes of social measurement that occur inside the state and

the construction and diffusion of sociological narratives, alongside the performative consequences

of both processes. He has recently published the bookEl ensamblaje de ciencia social y sociedad.

Conocimiento cientfico, gobierno de las conductas y produccin de lo social(2012).

Rsum

Cet article analyse les connexions entre les sciences sociales chiliennes et la connaissanceproduite dans les pays du centre, en les comparant avec les connexions existantes entre

ce mme pays et les autres pays latino-amricains, tout en accordant une attention

particulire au domaine thorique. Ce travail sappuie sur lanalyse du contenu depublications acadmiques et lanalyse du rseau social dune base de donnes de plus

de trente milles rfrences bibliographiques, issues de projets de recherche publis pardes chercheurs en sciences sociales chiliens dans des revues et des livres au Chili et

lextrieur, durant une priode de sept ans dans la premire dcennie de ce sicle.Les rsultats montrent que le niveau de connexions avec les autres pays de lAmriqueLatine est bas mais que les communications entre les auteurs chiliens sont relativement

nombreuses, surtout celles qui concernent un groupe de thoriciens locaux quioccupent des positions centrales dans le rseau. Il ne semble pas quil sagisse ici dune

forme de dpendance cognitive bien quelle se produise dans le contexte dune scienceinternationale caractrise par une remarquable ingalit.

Mots-cls

Communication scientifique, dpendance cognitive, rseau social, rgulation scientifique,sciences sociales, citation

Resumen

Este artculo analiza las conexiones de las ciencias sociales en Chile con el conocimientoque se produce en los pases centrales, en comparacin con las establecidas en el mismopas y en otros pases de Amrica Latina, prestando especial atencin a las conexiones

con respecto a la teora. Se basa en el anlisis de contenido de publicaciones acadmicasy en el anlisis de redes sociales aplicado a una base de datos de casi treinta mil

referencias bibliogrficas generadas por este proyecto de investigacin del universo de



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investigaciones publicadas por cientficos sociales chilenos en revistas y libros, tanto en

Chile como en el extranjero, en un perodo de siete aos en el primer dcada de estesiglo. Los resultados muestran que, en relacin con las comunicaciones internacionales,existe un bajo nivel de conectividad con otros pases de Amrica Latina, pero que las

comunicaciones entre autores chilenos son relativamente importantes y en particularlos que tienen un grupo de tericos locales que ocupan posiciones centrales en la

red. Este no parece ser un patrn de dependencia cognitiva, aunque se produce en elcontexto de una ciencia global que se caracteriza por una desigualdad notable.

Palabras clave

Comunicacin cientfica, dependencia cognitiva, red social, regulacin cientfica, ciencias

sociales, citacin

Ramos Zincke (2014) Local and Global Communication

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