Plant Science research productivity in Chile during the past 20 years

The purpose of this study was to carry out a bibliometric analysis of the articles published in Chile during 1987-2006 that were categorized into the Plant Science discipline by ISI. The data was extracted from the Web of Science datábase, obtaining a total of 911 articles for analysis. Almost half of the articles were the outcome of an international collaboration, the United States being the country with more collaborative links with Chile within this discipline. A list was made with the 10 most-cited articles and 10 most frequently used journals. The analysis showed that almost 50 percent of the articles were concentrated in 10 different journals. The number of articles produced each year revealed a steady growth in scientific production since 1987. This is probably related to the progressive interaction between industry and public-research institutions.

Una mirada epistemométrica de la Revista Médica de Chile y su aporte al conocimiento en Medicina / A scientometric view of Revista Médica de Chile

Background: During the last decade Revista Médica de Chile increased its visibility, measured on citations and impact factor. Aim: To perform a scientometric analysis to assess the performance of Revista Médica de Chile. Material and methods: Thomson's-ISI Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports QCR) were consulted for performance indicators of Revista Médica de Chile and Latin Amerícan journals whose subject is General and Internal Medicine. We also report the h-index of the journal, which infers quality ¡inked to the quantity of the output. Results: According to the h-index, Revista Médica de Chile ranks 4 among the 36 journals indexed and published by Argentina, Brazil, Chile and México. The top ten articles published by Revista Médica de Chile and the institutions with the higher contríbution to the journal, were identified using citations. In the Latin Amerícan región, Brazil relevantly increased its scientific output. However, Argentina, Chile and México maintain a plateau during the last decade. Conclusions: Revista Médica de Chile increased notoriously its performance. Its contríbution to the Chilean scientific community dedicated to Medicine appears to be of central value.

Generation and analysis of an Eucalyptus globulus cDNA library constructed from seedlings subjected to low temperature conditions

Eucalyptus globulus is the most important commercial temperate hardwood in the world because of its wood properties and due to its characteristics for biofuel production. However, only a very low number of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are publicly available for this tree species. We constructed a cDNA from E. globulus seedlings subjected to low temperature and sequenced 9,913 randomly selected clones, generating 8,737 curated ESTs. The assembly produced 1,062 contigs and 3,879 singletons forming a Eucalyptus unigene set. Based on BLASTX analysis, 89.3 percent of the contigs and 88.5 percent of the singletons had significant similarity to known genes in the non-redundant database of GenBank. The Eucalyptus unigene set generated is a valuable public resource that provides an initial model for genes and regulatory pathways involved in cell wall biosynthesis at low temperature.