Highly cited tropical medicine articles in the Web of Science from 1991 to 2020: A bibliometric analysis.

Background: An adequate response to health needs to include the identification of research patterns about the large number of people living in the tropics and subjected to tropical diseases. Studies have shown that research does not always match the real needs of those populations, and that citation reflects mostly the amount of money behind particular publications. Here we test the hypothesis that research from richer institutions is published in better-indexed journals, and thus has greater citation rates.

The geographic distribution of Costa Rican velvet worms (Onychophora: Peripatidae).

Velvet worms, "peripatus" or onychophorans, are "living fossils" that were geographically widespread in Cambrian seas but now occur exclusively on terrestrial habitats. The only extant species studied in some detail are those from Costa Rica, but their real geographic distribution was in urgent need of revision. To solve this problem we visited the localities mentioned in all the original taxonomic descriptions and redescriptions.

Bibliometry of the Revista de Biología Tropical / International Journal of Tropical Biology and Conservation: document types, languages, countries, institutions, citations and article lifespan.

The Revista de Biología Tropical / International Journal of Tropical Biology and Conservation, founded in 1953, publishes feature articles about tropical nature and is considered one of the leading journals in Latin America. This article analyzes document type, language, countries, institutions, citations and for the first time article lifespan, from 1976 through 2014. We analyzed 3 978 documents from the Science Citation Index Expanded.

[Do biological assemblages and ensembles really exist?].

In recent years the terms assemblage and ensemble have become more frequent in the ecological literature. After analyzing the definitions of the words in the French original, as well as their use in English and Spanish and opinions on how they can be defined, I conclude that the words assemblage and ensemble rarely improve scientific communication and can be eliminated from most ecological articles. The few justified exceptions are articles in which the emphasis is on how taxonomically close species interact trophically.

Oscillation of the velvet worm slime jet by passive hydrodynamic instability.

The rapid squirt of a proteinaceous slime jet endows velvet worms (Onychophora) with a unique mechanism for defence from predators and for capturing prey by entangling them in a disordered web that immobilizes their target. However, to date, neither qualitative nor quantitative descriptions have been provided for this unique adaptation. Here we investigate the fast oscillatory motion of the oral papillae and the exiting liquid jet that oscillates with frequencies f~30-60 Hz.

[The invalidity of the impact factor as indicator of the impact of Latin American scientific journals].

Use of the Impact Factor is currently being discarded in industrialized countries where, to name one case, up to 40% of the articles published in Nature are never cited, despite the high Impact Factor of that journal. However, it is still used in Latin America to evaluate journals and authors, potentially influencing who are given positions and who receives funding. To find out how valid the Impact Factor is for Latin American research, 1 used the database BINABITROP to see how much of the relevant literature was used to measure impact.

Use of a Geographic Information System and lichens to map air pollution in a tropical city: San José, Costa Rica.

There are no studies of air pollution bio-indicators based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Costa Rica. In this study we present the results of a project that analyzed tree trunk lichens as bioindicators of air pollution in 40 urban parks located along the passage of wind through the city of San Jose in 2008 and 2009. The data were processed with GIS and are presented in an easy to understand color coded isoline map.

Subject and authorship of records related to the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) in BINABITROP, a comprehensive database about Costa Rican biology.

BINABITROP is a bibliographical database of more than 38000 records about the ecosystems and organisms of Costa Rica. In contrast with commercial databases, such as Web of Knowledge and Scopus, which exclude most of the scientific journals published in tropical countries, BINABITROP is a comprehensive record of knowledge on the tropical ecosystems and organisms of Costa Rica. We analyzed its contents in three sites (La Selva, Palo Verde and Las Cruces) and recorded scientific field, taxonomic group and authorship.

Costa Rica publications in the Science Citation Index Expanded: a bibliometric analysis for 1981-2010.

Despite of its small size, the Central American country of Costa Rica is internationally recognized as one of the world leaders in conservation and as the Central American leader in science. There have been no recent studies on the country's scientific production. The objective of this study was to analyze the Costa Rican scientific output as represented in the Science Citation Index Expanded.

Bibliometry of Costa Rica biodiversity studies published in the Revista de Biología Tropical/International Journal of Tropical Biology and Conservation (2000-2010): the content and importance of a leading tropical biology journal in its 60th anniversary.

Central America is recognized as a mega diverse "hot-spot" and one of its smaller countries, Costa Rica, as one of the world's leaders in the study and conservation of tropical biodiversity. For this study, inspired by the 60th anniversary of the journal Revista de Biología Tropical, we tabulated all the scientific production on Costa Rican biodiversity published in Revista de Biología Tropical between 2000 and 2010. Most articles are zoological (62%) and 67% of authors had only one publication in the jounal within that period.

Unexplored character diversity in onychophora (velvet worms): A comparative study of three peripatid species.

Low character variation among onychophoran species has been an obstacle for taxonomic and phylogenetic studies in the past, however we have identified a number of new and informative characters using morphological, molecular, and chromosomal techniques. Our analyses involved a detailed examination of Epiperipatus biolleyi from Costa Rica, Eoperipatus sp. from Thailand, and a new onychophoran species and genus from Costa Rica, Principapillatus hitoyensisgen.

Which statistics should tropical biologists learn?

Tropical biologists study the richest and most endangered biodiversity in the planet, and in these times of climate change and mega-extinctions, the need for efficient, good quality research is more pressing than in the past. However, the statistical component in research published by tropical authors sometimes suffers from poor quality in data collection; mediocre or bad experimental design and a rigid and outdated view of data analysis. To suggest improvements in their statistical education, we listed all the statistical tests and other quantitative analyses used in two leading tropical journals, the Revista de Biología Tropical and Biotropica, during a year.

Air pollution in a tropical city: the relationship between wind direction and lichen bio-indicators in San José, Costa Rica.

Lichens are good bio-indicators of air pollution, but in most tropical countries there are few studies on the subject; however, in the city of San José, Costa Rica, the relationship between air pollution and lichens has been studied for decades. In this article we evaluate the hypothesis that air pollution is lower where the wind enters the urban area (Northeast) and higher where it exits San José (Southwest). We identified the urban parks with a minimum area of approximately 5,000 m2 and randomly selected a sample of 40 parks located along the passage of wind through the city.

Urban vegetation change after a hundred years in a tropical city (San José de Costa Rica).

Urban vegetation is of key importance because a large proportion of the human population lives in cities. Nevertheless, urban vegetation is understudied outside central Europe and particularly, little is known about the flora of tropical Asian, African and Latin American cities. We present an estimate of how the vegetation has changed in the city of San José, Costa Rica, after about one century, with the repeat photography technique (based on a collection of 19th and early 20th century photographs by José Fidel Tristán and others) and with data from the Costa Rican National Herbarium.

A new giant species of placented worm and the mechanism by which onychophorans weave their nets (Onychophora: Peripatidae).

Onychophorans, or velvet worms, are poorly known and rare animals. Here we report the discovery of a new species that is also the largest onychophoran found so far, a 22 cm long female from the Caribbean coastal forest of Costa Rica. Specimens were examined with Scanning Electron Microscopy; Peripatus solorzanoi sp.

Determinants of scientific output: an in-depth view of the productivity of tropical botanist and conservationist, Luis Diego Gómez Pignataro.

Bibliometric studies have found that male researchers have their greatest productivity around the age of 40, that female researchers produce less than their male colleagues, that incentives for collaboration are slow to affect productivity and that, just like humans, research institutes become larger, less productive, more expensive to maintain and less able to raise money as they grow old. Almost invariably, these conclusions come from statistical studies of large numbers of European and American scientists, and there are practically no studies about tropical researchers. We present an in-depth analysis of the productivity of an internationally recognized tropical botanist and conservationist, Luis Diego Gómez Pignataro, based on the totality of his published work and on our own knowledge, as co-workers and friends, of the life frame in which that scientific output was produced.

Sex ratio in two species of Pegoscapus wasps (Hymenoptera: Agaonidae) that develop in figs: can wasps do mathematics, or play sex ratio games?

The fig pollinating wasps (Hymenoptera: Agaonidae) have obligate arrhenotoky and a breeding structure that fits local mate competition (LMC). It has been traditionally assumed that LMC organisms adjust the sex ratio by laying a greater proportion of male eggs when there is superparasitism (several foundresses in a host). We tested the assumption with two wasp species, Pegoscapus silvestrii, pollinator of Ficus pertusa and Pegoscapus tonduzi, pollinator of Ficus eximia (= F citrifolia), in the Central Valley of Costa Rica.

[Correct use of Spanish when writing biological papers].

We present a list of the most frequent errors in biological manuscripts written in Spanish, and we explain which are the recommended options. Our article is based on the International Codes of Nomenclature, and the guidelines of the Real Academia de la Lengua and the Council of Science Editors. We group the indications in four categories: lexical errors (e.

[Which are the most influential journals, books and scientists in Latin American biology?].

A survey was distributed by e-mail to 553 biologists who study the Neotropics, in order to identify the journals, books and researchers with the greatest influence over Latin American biology. The biologists' database of the Revista de Biología Tropical was used to obtain their addresses. One third of them answered.

The countries and languages that dominate biological research at the beginning of the 21st century.

Traditionally, studies of scientific productivity are biased in two ways: they are based on Current Contents, an index centered in British and American journals, and they seldom correct for population size, ignoring the relative effort that each society places in research. We studied national productivity for biology using a more representative index, the Biological Abstracts, and analyzed both total and relative productivity. English dominates biological publications with 87% (no other individual language reaches 2%).

Experimental taphonomy of velvet worms (Onychophora) and implications for the Cambrian "explosion, disparity and decimation" model.

Experimental preservation of velvet worms (phylum Onychophora), a very rare but evolutionarily important group that has existed for more than 500 million years, showed that the absence of bucal parts, adhesive-expelling organs, gonopore, eyes, legs, claws, annulation and papillation in fossils may not represent absence in the living animals. In fossils, leg thickness and claw orientation can be unreliable. The experiments indicate that not only absence, but even presence of certain structures can simply be the result of tissue decomposition.