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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Indicators of research circulation: Localization and
internationalization under scrutiny—The Cuyo
Manual and its exploratory case study in Argentina

a n o p e n a c c e s s

j o u r n a l

Víctor Algañaraz

, Flavia Prado

, and M. Pía Rossomando

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET, Argentina) and
National University of San Juan (UNSJ), San Juan, Argentina

Citation: Algañaraz, V., Prado, F., &
Rossomando, M. P. (2023). Indicators of
research circulation: Localization and
internationalization under scrutiny—The
Cuyo Manual and its exploratory case
study in Argentina. Quantitative Science
Studies, 4(1), 283–305. https://doi.org/10
.1162/qss_a_00229

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00229

Peer Review:
https://www.webofscience.com/api
/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1162
/qss_a_00229

Supporting Information:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00229

Received: 8 February 2022
Accepted: 23 November 2022

Corresponding Author:
Víctor Algañaraz
victor.algz@gmail.com

Handling Editor:
Gabriel Velez Cuartas

Copyright: © 2023 Víctor Algañaraz,
Flavia Prado, and M. Pía Rossomando.
Published under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
license.

The MIT Press

Keywords: internationalization, knowledge circulation, publications, science and technology
indicators, scientific capital, universities

ABSTRACT

Given the limitations of traditional scientometric indicators to recognize the diversity of
circulating knowledge in different languages, formats and regions, the Research Center on the
Circulation of Knowledge (CECIC-Argentina) has developed a set of research circulation
analytical indicators, nucleated in the “Cuyo Manual.” This article presents the results of the
first exploratory case study carried out, that of the Universidad Nacional de San Martín
(UNSAM), showing how the institution and its researchers internationalize, regionalize or
territorialize their scientific productions. In addition to the articles published in internationally
oriented journals, under what other formats and in which directions does research production
circulate? What are the capacities installed and actions deployed by the university in terms of
research circulation? These and other questions are addressed in this paper, in order to show
the diversity and multiscalarity of the scientific knowledge produced, which crosses not only
international and national spaces but also the closest areas of influence to the institution itself.

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INTRODUCTION

The purported internationalization of scientific, technological, and innovation (STI) activities,
as well as their relatively conventional parameters of measurement and evaluation, have in
recent decades aroused numerous criticisms among academic communities in various parts
of the world. Leading specialists (Albornoz & Osorio, 2018; Beigel, 2014; Losego & Arvanitis,
2008, among others) have pointed out the tensions and asymmetries generated in the World
Scientific System as a result of the universalization of indexed publications in databases, such
as Web of Science ( WoS) or Scopus, and the preponderance acquired by the writing of articles
in English as a criterion of validation and academic recognition.

In particular, the communities of nonhegemonic countries, also called peripheral, whose
natural language is generally not English, have been expressing a growing concern about the
low impact of their scientific productions in this global publication system.

In line with this, from the Research Center on the Circulation of Knowledge (CECIC), which
has its headquarters in Argentina, we have distanced ourselves from the traditional internation-
alization perspective, identified as a guarantor of the hierarchies imposed by a system of com-
mercialized publications. From recognizing the vitality and diversity of alternative spaces to
this dominant system and to legitimize the active role of “peripheral” academic communities

Indicators of research circulation

in STI production, with CECIC we have developed a theoretical perspective of multiscale cir-
culation of scientific knowledge, recognizing multiple formats and circulation routes—local,
national, and regional—besides the international ones.

The methodological complement to this approach has crystallized in the design of a set of
institutional indicators of knowledge circulation, which are developed in what we have called
the “Cuyo Manual” (CECIC, 2020). This is a relational indicators model that, in accordance
with a “bottom-up” information gathering logic, seeks to be implemented in university insti-
tutions or research organizations, and to provide a more dynamic vision of their interaction
geographical scales to recognize the multidimensionality of the knowledge circulation gener-
ated there.

The purpose of this article is to advance the empirical study of a public university institution
in Argentina, the National University of San Martin (UNSAM), located in the suburbs of the
province of Buenos Aires and forged in the heat of the 1990s, a context in which Latin Amer-
ican universities were reconfigured according to the neoliberal development model. Focusing
the analytical lens on an Argentine university is of great interest and relevance, as according to
Beigel, Gallardo, and Bekerman (2018) this country has recently become a “peripheral scien-
tific center” in the region.

In particular, the following questions will be addressed as guiding axes in the presented
case analysis: What are the installed capacities and actions deployed by the university in terms
of research circulation? What endogenous and exogenous modalities of knowledge accredi-
tation does the institution promote? Besides articles published in internationally oriented jour-
nals, under what other formats and in which directions does the research production circulate?
That is to say, what other modalities of knowledge circulation are deployed? Which are the
participating disciplinary spaces? And what are their geographical scales of implication?

By implementing the indicators contemplated in the Cuyo Manual, we hope to understand
how the institution and its researchers internationalize, regionalize, or territorialize their
scientific productions. We seek to account for the diversity of scientific knowledge produced
in the university under study—a diversity that, as we shall see, is multiscale, because the
circulation circuits pass through not only international and national spaces but also the closest
areas of influence to the institution itself.

The article is organized as follows: In Section 2 we review the relevant literature highlight-
ing the main conceptual knots of the theme; and in Section 3 we present the methodology and
describe the data and methods, paying special attention to the proposal of indicators that
constitutes the Cuyo Manual. In Section 4, we detail the results of the presented study case
and in Section 5, finally, we conclude the paper, discussing some political implications and
pointing out new research developments.

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

2.1. Mainstream Science and Technology Indicators as Unidirectional Vectors of

Academic Internationalization

STI production developed in universities and research agencies around the world is closely
followed, and increasingly so, by governments and civil institutions, public opinion, and
various international actors. The growing interest in the knowledge generated in these spaces,
usually sustained on the premise that science is equivalent to development, lies in its potential
to diversify resources in a given territory, improve the quality of basic or applied research, or
take advantage of opportunities in relation to the socioproductive environment.

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Hence, we see the great influence that science and technology indicators have gained
around the world, oriented to account for the relationship between resources invested and
products obtained at the level of individuals, institutions, and countries. The quantification
of the number of researchers per thousand inhabitants and the count of invention patents in
relation to the total number of scientists and investment amounts, as well as bibliometric indi-
cators (number of scientific publications per author and per institution, and citation frequency)
have been considered sufficient elements to evaluate and validate the characteristics of a
country’s scientific development.

Thus, obtaining high values in these indices was considered a direct reflection of high rates
of investment in STI and became an indicative factor of the social and economic development
of a given country, also assuming a certain use by the social and productive sectors of such
research capabilities and resources. Leading specialists (Ortiz, 2009; Ràfols, 2019; Vessuri,
Guédon, & Cetto, 2014; among others), report that metrics and research evaluation systems
were specifically the preferred means of institutionalization and universalization of a style con-
sidered legitimate and valid for the production and international circulation of knowledge. In a
recent study, Vélez-Cuartas, Uribe-Tirado et al. (2021) indicated that the use of indicators such
as the Impact Factor in the Journal Citations Reports ( JCR) and the indexing of journals in WoS
(now Clarivate), created together with the Institute for Scientific Information in the mid-20th
century, along with the appearance of the large bibliographic reference and citation database
Scopus, promoted by Elsevier at the beginning of the 21st century, constituted a select system
of mainstream publications.

In this context, Beigel (2014) has pointed out that journals basically became the guiding
axis of the World Scientific System, a phenomenon that was enhanced by the hyper-
centralization of the English language and the growing flow of scientific information through
new virtual technological supports. In this framework, we can mention, for example, the
advent of Google Scholar (in 2004), a web search engine that extended information on scien-
tific and bibliographic content to a wider audience, as well as the h-index (in 2005), a tech-
nique based specifically on the individual researchers’ citation counts.

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In this context, global university rankings were also consolidated (such as the Shanghai rank-
ing and the Times Higher Education list), which tended to hierarchize/classify higher education
institutions worldwide according to the internationalization degree achieved (Aguillo, Ortega,
& Fernández, 2008). Consequently, the publication of scientific articles in English became one
of the main sources of international prestige and a select group of universities monopolized the
top of the world rankings. The allegedly “international” character of STI activities became a
well-recognized and rewarded value in terms of academic and economic capital.

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Available studies on the universalization of these tendencies (Babini & Rovelli, 2020; Baranger
& Beigel, 2021) show that it was fundamentally the systems of scientific production evaluation in
the academic communities that stimulated this orientation towards internationalization by
recovering bibliometric indicators and information about indexing as valuation criteria.

In short, the proliferation of these tools and their widespread use in the evaluation of sci-
entific performance ended up configuring a sort of global metric market that increased the
unequal accumulation of “international” scientific capital, which came to be measured essen-
tially through citations and coauthorships.

2.2. Overview of the New Routes of Open Access to Knowledge

Criticism of the effects of this internationalization model of knowledge and its measurement
and evaluation indices has multiplied in recent decades. Authors such as Ràfols (2019), Spezi,

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Wakeling et al. (2017), and Vélez-Cuartas et al. (2021) have been making important contribu-
tions to the general debate about the open access approach to scientific information and the
overweighting of publications in international journals indexed in WoS or Scopus. Among the
main points, it is observed that the major European and North American publishers have built
a big business around the charging of tariffs to authors for their publications, resulting in the exclu-
sion of a large number of researchers (and, therefore, of their scientific production) who cannot
afford to pay the Article Processing Charge (APC). This has clearly deepened academic inequal-
ities between researchers, institutions, and countries.

Based on this background, some studies (e.g., Beigel, 2019; Vélez-Cuartas, Lucio-Arias, &
Leydesdorff, 2016) recognize the existence of diverse modalities and routes of scientific
knowledge circulation in various parts of the world, which are invisibilized/delegitimized
by the exclusive use of mainstream databases.

To move away from this trend towards the international measurement of knowledge,
several European countries, for example, have established relevant national bibliographic
databases. These Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), which emerged during the
1990s, have become specialized infrastructures for the collection and communication of
scientific information. They are characterized by harvesting and making visible varied and
exhaustive information about teams of researchers, intellectual properties, publications,
research projects, funding sources, and data sets. Among their main advantages is that they
highlight the broad criteria established for the inclusion of STI production, incorporating books
formats, for example, and writing in different languages than English.

Among the most outstanding of these we can mention the Flemish Academic Bibliographic
Database, implemented in Belgium, and the Current Research Information System in Norway.
Similar national bibliographic database formats are also being developed in Finland, Portugal,
and Denmark. According to studies by Pölönen, Guns et al. (2021) and Sīle, Pölönen et al.
(2018), the development of these national repositories has been especially relevant in the
Social Sciences and Humanities, where the coverage of their publications by mainstream
databases is proportionally lower than in the Exact or Natural Sciences.

As for the pending challenges, the most important is perhaps to converge in a large integral
ecosystem, given the limitations they present to establish the information articulations con-
tained in each one, due to the specific details they have acquired in each country.

In this context, the General Conference of UNESCO has had overarching relevance, and,
after an extensive process of international discussion, it approved the “Open Science Recom-
mendation” at its 41st session, held in Paris in November 2021. Among the main proposals,
the need to promote an exchange of scientific knowledge in different formats and from differ-
ent geographical origins has been recognized, not only among specialized academic commu-
nities but also in dialog with traditionally excluded groups: women, minorities, indigenous
researchers, and scientists from less favored countries and with languages with few resources.
UNESCO has urged member states to “collaborate in bilateral, regional, multilateral and
global initiatives for the advancement of open science” (UNESCO, 2021, p. 3).

2.3. Peripheriality or Scientific Diversity in Latin America? The Constitution of Argentina as a

Peripheral Academic Center in the Region

The measurement of individual and institutional performance in the university rankings and com-
mercial indexing databases has clearly had an unfavorable effect on the institutions and academics
of the “peripheral” regions. Beigel (2019) shows that, in Latin America, for example, these

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measurement/evaluation instruments have been leading to the devaluation of the writing and
speaking processes of native languages, as well as of other formats and publication channels.

According to Rodríguez Medina (2019), knowledge is also geographically, politically, eco-
nomically, and culturally situated. “It is not surprising, then, that flow circuits of knowledge are
established, that, in general, link people, institutions and countries in the so-called developed
world more frequently than they do with colleagues in the developing world. […] Permanent
and institutionalized contacts between those located in the global south, on the other hand,
are scarce” (Rodríguez Medina, 2019, p. 22).

Given the complexities concerning the visibility and circulation of knowledge generated in
the “periphery,” important efforts are also being made in these latitudes to develop alternative
information systems. In Latin America, especially, it is worth mentioning the institutionaliza-
tion of the Latindex (1994), SciELO (1998), and Redalyc (2003) systems as transcendental
milestones in the digitization and indexing of circulating journals in the region (Vessuri
et al., 2014). This is a corpus of approximately 10,000 publications, most of which are man-
aged by the academic community itself. In the words of Salatino (2021), the Latin American
repositories present a notable linguistic diversity, as even with a preponderance of Spanish,
contributions in Portuguese and English are also recognized.

Additionally, in the transition to open science in Latin America, there are important promot-
ing experiences of the circulation and knowledge of open access. Argentina and Mexico, for
example, have national open access laws, and although there are interoperability difficulties,
they have deployed their own systems of management and evaluation of scientific personnel
at the national level: SIGEVA-CONICET in the first case and the National Repository of CON-
ACYT in the second. In Colombia, for example, there is the Scientific Information Colombian
Network (RedCol), which manages and sustains the technological infrastructure to visualize
and dispose the national scientific production (Babini & Rovelli, 2020). Regarding the progress
of CRIS systems in the region, we may highlight Peru-CRIS and Br-CRIS (developed in Brasil),
which are national informatic repositories created with the purpose of maximizing research
value and development in each country.

In line with these initiatives, it is worth mentioning that, since the end of 2019, the Latin
American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) created the Latin American Forum on Scien-
tific Evaluation (FOLEC), a space for permanent debate and exchange on research evaluation
politics and practice in the region, from a perspective that strengthens the open, public, and
interconnected charcacter of scientific knowledge, as the CRIS systems have been proposing
(CLACSO-FOLEC, 2021). The main interest of FOLEC lies in promoting regional initiatives of
infrastructure for open science, constituting a fundamental political tool of incentives for open
access publications, with a focus on bibliodiversity and multilingualism.

From the above, it is clear that in Latin America there is no a unidirectional knowledge val-
idation and circulation model, sustained only by the importation of scientific standards from
mainstream circuits. In fact, scientific peripherality itself has diversified in the region, identifying
a continuum between marginal scientific communities and others that have become “peripheral
centers” (Beigel, 2014). Hence, some researchers are more integrated to “mainstream” produc-
tion styles, and others participate strongly in the alternative regional circuits we have described
(contributing to enhanced collaborative research and South-South academic flows, for exam-
ple). Many others still remain linked to the more endogenous institutional agendas.

Focusing particularly on the Argentine scientific university field, it should be noted that in
recent decades it has recovered its center-periphery character in the Latin American academic
circuit. After the great structural crisis of 2001–2002, which, among other things, reduced the

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levels of public investment in scientific development to a historic minimum, the country expe-
rienced a significant and heterogeneous expansion of its STI capacities, consolidating its uni-
versity and public scientific matrix. Beigel et al. (2018) highlighted the considerable budget
increase experienced from 2003 onward, which resulted in the opening of new institutions,
salary increases for lecturers, and strengthening of the scientific scholarships system and post-
graduate careers, as well as tripling of the number of full-time researchers.

However, during this expansive stage of STI capabilities, a series of institutional asymme-
tries and geographic inequalities within the field also deepened. According to Beigel (2017,
p. 828), “the polarization between scientists integrated into the dominant production styles in
the world academic system and those with a more endogenous agenda, get deeper.” Two
major opposing scientific profiles materialized around the two main areas of STI production
and circulation of knowledge in the country: public universities and the National Council for
Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET).

In this sense, given the weight acquired by mainstream science and technology indicators
in CONICET’s evaluation system, most of its researchers have a more internationalized curric-
ular trajectory based on their strong attachment to the publications circuit indexed in WoS and
Scopus. In contrast, most of the national (public) universities researchers deploy a fundamen-
tally local habitus, enjoying higher quotas of institutional recognition from the weighting
indexed publications in regional databases, among other formats of their scientific productions
publication. However, as these are not disjoint but complementary organisms operating in the
same field, autonomous and heteronomous research tendencies that cross all disciplines, con-
verge from both of the different principles of legitimization.

3. DATA AND METHODS

3.1. The Cuyo Manual: A Proposal for “Bottom-up” Knowledge Circulation Indicators

At CECIC, we have been developing a theoretical approach on the multiscale circulation of
scientific knowledge, which recognizes and weighs the different interactions and formats that
integrate the research process. This approach (Beigel, 2019; Beigel & Algañaraz, 2020) is
based on the following guiding ideas:

(cid:129) In the so-called “periphery” there are diverse institutional styles of production and knowledge
circulation that are related not only to the local dynamic of the institutions and their
researchers but also to the particular absorption of national politics and global opportunities.
(cid:129) The STI production of these communities develops in diverse transnational, regional,
national, and local circuits, thus breaking down the idea of an absolute belief in scien-
tometric and bibliometric indicators.

(cid:129) Science that is published in local languages other than English is relevant in the region,
although it is not duly recognized by the major indexing services. The same happens
with other formats of visibility/circulation of scientific productions, such as books, with
greater development among the social sciences and humanities, generally managed by
the academic community itself and not-for-profit organizations.

(cid:129) While some institutions promote the achievement of global prestige, others stimulate a
local “habitus” of circulation, and between the two extremes there coexist heterono-
mous production forms and knowledge circulation.

(cid:129) The processes of academic evaluation of institutions and individuals in these commu-
nities usually include intermediate instances that articulate the weighting of global cri-
teria with local needs.

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But this transition between the internationalization paradigm and that of circulation itself
has taken place not only on a conceptual level but also on a technical one. To accommodate
this, CECIC has developed a set of analytical indicators of scientific capital circulation,
institutionalized in the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020): a social technology that allows the
registration and articulation of diverse and exhaustive information on research processes in
universities and scientific organizations in a systematic and organized way. Methodologically,
the Cuyo Manual is formed from the interaction of four major analysis dimensions (Figure 1):
published scientific production; research capacities and actions; academic spatiality; and
university–society interaction.

Each of the analytical dimensions of the Cuyo Manual contributes to the recognition of a
specific modality of STI production circulation, for which the treatment of different instances
and locus of research circulation/legitimization has been included. In this way, it seeks to
transcend the unilateral consideration of published results and therefore the overestimation
of publications indexed in commercial databases, as well as English writing.

In addition, the Cuyo Manual recognizes not only the mainstream circuit but also the mul-
tiple geographical scales of scientific knowledge interactions: international, regional, national,
and fundamentally local. In this sense, it presents a convergent methodological design with

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Figure 1. The Cuyo Manual: analytical dimensions of research circulation. Source: Own elabora-
tion, based on Cuyo Manual (2020).

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other responsible measurement experiences, especially with the Valencia Manual; specifically,
the block corresponding to University–Society linkage: dialogue with the indicators of univer-
sity linkage with the socioeconomic environment prepared by the Ibero-American Network of
Science and Technology Indicators (RICyT, 2017).

In contrast to international trends in the measurement of scientific production, carried out in
a quantitative manner and through the harvesting of information in commercial indexing data-
bases, the Cuyo Manual promotes an inverse methodological approach (i.e., from the bottom
up). The proposed indicators model has been designed from the tracing/observation/analysis of
a diversified series of information sources retrieved in situ from the institutional environment
itself. In this sense, it entails a methodological approach with further empirical disaggregation
and prioritizes the horizontal collection and primary treatment of data.

This corpus of circulation indicators has been implemented in several public universities of
Argentina, selected ad hoc as pilot case studies. In particular, UNSAM has been the first insti-
tutional analysis experience. In this paper, we specifically recover the main findings of the first
two indicators blocks (Figure 2) in the UNSAM case: the scientific production published by the
institution and its “other” research capacities and interactions.

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Figure 2. Analytical indicator blocks of the Cuyo Manual, referring to “research circulation capac-
ities” and “published scientific production.” Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual
(CECIC, 2020).

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Indicators of research circulation

3.2. Collection and Information Sources Instrumented

Our field of observation is UNSAM and, in particular, the scientific production of its
researchers, as well as their formats and spaces of circulation. Indeed, during 2018–2020
we carried out an exhaustive fieldwork in the institution to collect the required information
by the Cuyo Manual. From there, the different circulation indicators examined refer to a
specific T-Year, in this case the academic year 2020, indicating the final moment of data
capture1.

A varied set of information sources was used: from data on its website (taking care that they
were updated to March 2020), also retrieving documents, reports, and institutional regulations,
to the management of different databases. Some of these databases were provided by UNSAM
itself, especially the one related to its lecturering staff, and the others were elaborated ad hoc
by the work team from formal access to the curricular information systems (SIGEVA) of the
university and CONICET.

Regarding editorial institution development, its own publication repositories were explored,
as well as the websites and books and journals catalogs published there. As for the articles
published by their researchers, the following indexing databases were explored: Scopus;
WoS-Clarivate; RedALyC; Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); and Scielo. In fact,
the tracing included a wide spectrum of searches, ranging from mainstream publication data-
bases to Latin American indexing systems themselves. Additionally, the researchers’ book and
book chapter production was explored, as declared in SIGEVA-UNSAM and SIGEVA-
CONICET.

To address the university’s research projects and agendas, the following were obtained: lists
of projects approved, funded, and in execution until 2020, hosted on the UNSAM institutional
website; payroll of research projects awarded and in force until 2020 by the National Agency
for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation (R&D&I Agency)
and CONICET; and documents provided by UNSAM with complementary information on its
research projects in execution during 2020.

Regarding scientific meetings, the following sources of information were inspected: the
Noticias UNSAM repository, hosted on the institutional website; and newsletters published
until March 2020 by the different Schools and Institutes of the university.

Finally, research agreements were collected by accessing the following sources: UNSAM’s
Bank of Bilateral Agreements, available on the institution’s website; and regulations related to
local and national agreements.

The reliability of the information sources used is based mainly on the following factors:

(cid:129) Exhaustive fieldwork that included long research stays and on-site data collect at the

institution.

(cid:129) The primary processing of the obtained information, most of which was retrieved from
the university’s own STI offices or specialized agencies in charge of counting, for
example, of human resources.

1 In Argentina, measures of Obligatory Social Isolation/Distancing, due to the pandemic generated by the
Sars-Cov-2 virus, were imposed by the national government from March 2020. By then, the “face-to-face”
fieldwork at UNSAM, which had started in 2018, was ending. Hence, contact established a priori with ref-
erents of the university allowed us to complete the tracing of missing information in a “virtual” way.

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Indicators of research circulation

(cid:129) The verification of the information from the cross-checking of different implemented accesses,
especially to corroborate the completeness of the information, avoid the overweighting of
the registers, and guarantee the accuracy of the data reported on the institutional website.

4. RESULTS

4.1. Editorial Development and Published Scientific Production
Starting with the question “What are the editorial capacities developed by the university to
promote the knowledge circulation?”, we will examine here its resources, infrastructure,
and specialized personnel in editorial tasks.

Table 1 shows that UNSAM has a central institutional repository under the Rector’s Office
that includes 720 documents: undergraduate and graduate theses (89%); parts of books (6%);
books (4%); and technical reports (1%). A pending issue is interoperability with the systems of
their own academic units and with other repositories, such as that of CONICET.

Among the infrastructures available for editing, since 2006 the university has had its own
publishing company: UNSAM-Edita. Unlike the large commercial publishers, its catalog
includes academic books, translations, literature, teaching notebooks, etc. Thus, bibliodiver-
sity is one of its outstanding characteristics.

UNSAM-Edita was a pioneer in the publication of e-books and, in fact, during 2018–2020
evidenced a significant amount of digital works: 61% of its total edited productions. From
Table 2, it is also clear that 50% of the books are published by authors belonging to the same
institution, although this proportion decreased compared to 2010 where the entire catalog was
represented by authors from UNSAM. As for translated publications, none of them are in
English (three are in French and one in Portuguese).

In relation to journals, the publishing company has not been linked in a stable way.

Currently, there is no cooperation policy between the publication of books and journals.

According to Table 3, of the 13 journals published by UNSAM during Year T, nine are from
the Social Sciences and four from the Humanities. The editorial bodies are mostly made up of
researchers who hold effective positions in the university. In all cases, they are periodicals and
have their respective ISSN or ISSNe. Regarding their indexing, only three journals are included
in the databases inquired: “Contemporary Ethnographies” in Latindex Catalog 2.0; “Working

Table 1.
Manual (CECIC, 2020)

Institutional repositories available and UNSAM’s publishing capabilities, year 2020. Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo

Indicators
Provision of a unified institutional repository

Number of academic unit repositories

Availability of metrics on visits and/or downloads

Number of full-text documents included in the institutional repository

Percentage of open access documents with respect to the total number of

full text documents included in the institutional repository

Availability of open data platform

Number of training workshops given to librarians and editors of its journals

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Yes

720

98%

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Table 2.

Books published at UNSAM, period 2018–2020. Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020)

Indicators
Number of total books in the catalog

Number of books edited by the university during the period 2018–2020

Percentage of books in digital/epub or other formats with respect to total books published

Percentage of books published by authors

from the university

Percentage of books published by authors from the
university, coauthored with other institutions

Number of books translated

from other national institutions

from Latin American institutions

from foreign institutions (non-Latin American)

researchers from other Argentine institutions

Latin American researchers (excluding Argentina)

foreign researchers (excluding Latin American)

Results
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61%

50%

11%

16%

23%

22%

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Papers” in DOAJ and Latindex Catalog 2.0; and “Task” also in DOAJ. (There is more informa-
tion about UNSAM publications in the Supplementary material.)

Now, if we focus on researchers and their publication practices, we should ask ourselves:
What are the formats and directions of knowledge circulation produced and published? Taking

Table 3.
Manual (CECIC, 2020)

Journals edited at UNSAM, year 2020. Source: own elaboration, based on the Cuyo

Indicators
Number of journals published

Percentage of journals by type of access

paper

digital

mixed

Results
13

100%

with full text available online

100%

with APC

with paid subscription

Number of journals by type of indexing

Latindex Directory

Latindex 2.0 Catalog

SciELO

DOAJ

RedALyC

WoS

Scopus

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Indicators of research circulation

Figure 3. Articles by UNSAM researchers, according to journal indexing bases, year 2020. Source:
Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020).

into consideration the 947 researchers and scholarship holders, either employed by the uni-
versity or dependent on CONICET (but whose workplace is in the institution), 1,434 registra-
tions of articles published in Year T were identified.

Figure 3 shows that most of the articles are concentrated in journals indexed in two specific
databases: Scopus (587 articles) and WoS-Clarivate (558). Both form part of the so-called
mainstream circuit for scientific publications, mainly including journals with APC and edited in
English. These publication practices contrast with the productions edited and published in the same
university which, as we have seen, present a purely local circulation flow. Special mention should
be made of the publications registered in DOAJ (167 articles), which includes open access scientific
journals and gives a relevant place to Latin American productions. Finally, the Scielo and RedALyC
databases had respectively 86 and 36 publications registrations by UNSAM authors, showing the
scarce interest of researchers in making their contributions visible at the regional level.

It should also be noted that, of the total number of articles registered in mainstream journals,
85% in Scopus and 74% in WoS were published by researchers in the fields of Natural and Exact
Sciences and Engineering and Technologies. On the other hand, in the RedALyC and Scielo
databases, 88% and 80%, respectively, of the articles were developed by researchers in Social
Sciences and Humanities.

Regarding the geographical location of journals, most of them are published in the United States,
Germany, United Kingdon, or France, while publications in Latin American and/or Argentine journals
are scarce. (There is more information on publication circulation in the Supplementary material.)

Together with scientific periodical publications, we have noticed the presence of an impor-
tant number of publications in books and/or book chapter format. From researching the registers
of the Argentine Chamber of Books, we observed that 329 university researchers published at
least one book or book chapter during Year T. Of course, these works were mostly published
by national organizations: 52% by universities and 48% by commercial publishers. The
publication of books stands out especially among the practices of researchers in the Social
Sciences and Humanities.

Assuming that Spanish, as the native language, has been prioritized in the diverse scientific
productions, we note a strong tendency to also publish in English. Table 4 shows that this
mainstream language assumed a differential weight according to its publication format: Arti-
cles written in English amount to 51% of the total, while publications of books or parts of
books in English reach only 11%, with a clear advantage for the local language.

4.2. Capacities and Interactions in Research

Besides published scientific production, what other institutional capacities has the university
developed and what complementary actions does it deploy in terms of knowledge circulation?

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Table 4.
(CECIC, 2020)

Languages of articles and books published by UNSAM researchers, year 2020. Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual

Indicators
Percentage of UNSAM-CONICET researchers who have published at least

one article, by language (different from the official one)

Percentage of UNSAM-CONICET researcher who have published at least
one book or book chapter, by language (other than the official one)

English

French

Portuguese

Other language

English

French

Portuguese

Other language

Results
51%

11%

The resources for STI activities at UNSAM are managed by the Secretariat for Research, Inno-
vation, and Transfer, located in the Vice-Rector’s Office. Regarding the funding sources
received during the Year T, 85% came from the STI function of the national budget and was
allocated to two specific items: 79% to personnel expenses and 21% to construction or repair
works and equipment. Other income came from external resources (mainly from CONICET and
the R&D&I Agency and, to a lesser extent, from government ministries and international orga-
nizations) and were mainly used to support scholarship holders and campus infrastructure.

Investment in research grants during Year T amounted to $4,401,037, including resources
for projects, scientific meetings, and researchers’ mobility2. We will focus on these three
dimensions of knowledge circulation.

From Table 5, we stabilized a database with 158 accredited and executed projects at
UNSAM during 2020. Most of them (72%) are Scientific and Technological Research Projects
(PICT) awarded by the R&D&I Agency and have a duration of 3 years. Another 24% refer to
Institutional Recognition Projects (PRI) accredited by the university itself (but without funding)
to give an institutional framework to its own scientific production processes. Finally, 4% are
Pluriannual Research Projects (PIP) and Executing Unit Projects (PUE) that are accredited by
CONICET. In sum, most of the projects deployed at UNSAM (76%) are accredited by national
scientific organizations and only 24% concern internal projects of the institution. If we look at
funding, all projects are supported by external resources, mostly from the R&D&I Agency
(94.2%) and to a lesser extent (5.8%) from CONICET3. (See the Supplementary material for
more information on the types of projects deployed at UNSAM.)

Figure 4 shows that the bulk of accredited and executed projects at UNSAM are concen-
trated in the Natural and Exact Sciences (49%). There is a direct proportionality between the
high percentage of projects in this knowledge area and the high proportion of publications by

2 It should be noted that the funds allocated to scientific meetings and researcher mobility were suspended in
March 2020 because of the covid-19 pandemic. However, as noted above, the circulation indicators con-
sider information captured prior to the pandemic.

3 Resources from international organizations and other public agencies of the country (excluding CONICET
and the R&D&I Agency) were not used for research projects or scholarship fellows but were mainly invested
in technology transfer actions or infrastructure works (UNSAM, 2020).

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Table 5.

Research projects carried out at UNSAM, ongoing to 2020. Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020)

Indicators
Total projects

158

Availability of funding

Yes

Percentage of accredited and funded projects,

the university itself

by subsidiary organization

R&D&I Agency

CONICET

other organizations

Results
120

94%

researchers from these same disciplines in mainstream journals (85% of the total published in
Scopus and 74% in WoS during Year T).

From the analysis of the projects, their topics, and abstracts, the research “agendas” of the
university were examined, which allow recognition of the directionality and objectives
assumed by the research resources (Table 6).

“Application fields” categories provided in the SIGEVA-UNSAM system, specifically in the
projects tab, were used as a basis for classification. According to the data collected, the highest
proportion of topics in the university’s research agenda corresponds to the field of Human
Health (32.3%), followed by topics related to Science, Education, and Culture (12.7%) and
in third place studies on Agricultural Production/Technology (10.1%).

How can we explain the high proportion of the field “Human Health” in the university the-
matic agenda, when only 9% of the projects are grouped in the area of Medical Sciences? This
is due to the growing interest in this thematic field, which transcends disciplinary specificity
and contributions are made from different areas of knowledge. Among the projects devoted to
its study, we can mention: “Closed loop control system by motion sensors for deep brain stim-
ulation in Parkinson’s disease,” anchored in the area of Engineering and Technology.

On the other hand, we have established four geographical scales that help to understand
the delimitation of the study objects in the projects: Within the “national” sphere we differen-
tiate the “local” and within the “international” the “Latin American” regional space. In this
case study, a small proportion of the projects (4%) present topics based in the San Martín
locality and 35% of the projects focus on topics located in other areas of the national territory.
On the other hand, research projects that investigate topics from other latitudes (in many cases

Figure 4. Projects carried out at UNSAM, according to major disciplinary areas, year 2020.
Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020).

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Table 6. Agendas of research projects carried out at UNSAM, year 2020. Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC,
2020)

Indicators
Percentage of accredited and

financed projects, by:

thematic area of
application

geographic scope of
research topics

Multiple fields

Science, Education, and Culture

Defense and Security

Socioeconomic Development and Services

Energy and Fuels

Informatic

Matter and Space

Agricultural Production/Technology

Industrial Production/Technology

General Promotion of Knowledge/Exact Sciences

General Promotion of Knowledge/Social Sciences

Natural Resources and Environment

Human Health

Urbanism and Territory

Include local studies

Include studies of other national spaces

Include studies on other Latin American countries
(including comparative studies with Argentina)

Projects not limited to studies with specific

geographic anchors.

Results
3%

13%

10%

32%

35%

13%

43%

comparatively with Argentina) prioritize a rather regional scope (13%) over studies focused on
other areas abroad (5%).

However, during the analysis of the research projects agendas, we have detected a signif-
icant number of studies without a specific geographical location (43%). These are study
objects that focus on experimental and/or technological developments whose designs and
results would have diverse applicability in the field of geolocation.

A noteworthy fact is that “international” and “Latin American” approaches have predominated
in the research agendas of what are called hard sciences (if we lump together the disciplines cor-
responding to Engineering, Medicine, and Exact and Natural Sciences), reaching 63% representa-
tion in the first case and 67% in the second. As for the smaller scales of aggregation, the research
agendas of disciplines linked to the Social and Human Sciences predominated, which together
accounted for 58% of the “national” and 54% of the “local” studies. The studies without a specific
geographic focus, as expected, were overwhelmingly concentrated (98%) in the “hard sciences.”

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Another valuable instance of science circulation is the scientific meeting, which involves
the dissemination of certain flows of knowledge among experts through a specialized
language and within the framework of a specific locus.

Regarding Table 7, during Year T UNSAM held 111 scientific meetings, mostly in the form
of symposiums, open seminars, and study circles. Unlike other more standardized scientific
event formats, this institution has especially promoted study circles, planned as spaces for
horizontal and participatory formation. The Social Sciences made visible the largest number
of scientific events at UNSAM (51.4%), followed by Engineering and Technology (26.1%).
Next to the Humanities, with 18.9% and with a lower visibility of events, we find the Medical
and Health Sciences and the Natural and Exact Sciences with 1.8% each.

Regarding the geographical scale of knowledge circulation (Figure 5), 36% of the scientific
meetings were local (held within the university’s area of influence), 30% national (co-organized
with other universities or CONICET), 12% Latin American (co-organized or subsidized by other
institutions in the region), and 22% international (co-organized or subsidized by foreign
academic centers).

It should be noted that the most common geographical scales of scientific meetings for what
are traditionally called hard sciences have been predominantly national (45%) and interna-
tional (27%) in character. In contrast, for the Social and Human Sciences as a whole, the most
common types of meeting have been local (44%) and national (23%).

Finally, another of the most relevant actions in terms of research circulation refers to coop-
eration agreements and obtaining international funding. Although, following the onset of the

Table 7.

Scientific meetings held at UNSAM, year 2020. Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020)

Indicators
Total number of scientific meetings held at the university

Percentage of scientific meetings,

type of event

Study circles

according to:

Scientific congresses

Workshop

Symposiums

Open seminars

areas of knowledge

Medical and Health Sciences

geographic scope of the

call for proposals

Natural and Exact Sciences

Social Sciences

Humanities

Agricultural, Engineering,

and Technology Sciences

Local

National

Latin American

International (non-Latin American)

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Results
111

22%

35%

28%

51%

19%

26%

36%

30%

12%

22%

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Figure 5. Scientific meetings held at UNSAM, according to type of event and disciplinary area, year 2020. Source: Own elaboration, based
on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020).

pandemic, its usual interactions with other countries were completely affected, fundamentally
the processes in-person mobility led the university to incorporate “Virtual Mobility as an emer-
gency mechanism” (UNSAM, 2020).

However, as we pointed out above, the fieldwork in UNSAM ended in March 2020. Thus,
in this article, data collection reflects the prepandemic situation. As of that date, the university
reported 62 new international agreements entered into with institutions from 25 different
countries under the formats of framework, specific, and specific mobility agreements4.

Of the agreements established by UNSAM (Table 8) the vast majority (165) are concen-
trated in European countries, 84 in Latin American countries and 11 in English-speaking
America (including the United States and Canada). The rest constitute very specific agreements
with other countries in other continents, although eight international cooperation agreements
with intergovernmental organizations stand out in particular.

In this sense, three main routes of research agreements can be identified: a Euro-American
international circuit, marked by a strong presence of countries considered central, such as
Germany, France, Italy, and the United States; a Latin American international circuit, where
agreements with countries such as Brazil, Chile, and Colombia stand out; and a transnational
circuit (with mainly European funds), with an active role of intergovernmental or nongovernmen-
tal organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the International Labor Organization (ILO).

4 For the purposes of this paper, we have prioritized references to the interinstitutional agreements made by
UNSAM, and in particular those corresponding to academic mobility, in accordance with the meso char-
acter of the research carried out. Therefore, information about the participants and their trips is not included
here. However, based on the assumption that agreements between academic institutions are usually bureau-
cratic documents, which do not necessarily correspond to practices, those active and current agreements
that registered at least one effective trip during the period under study were included in the information
tracing and analysis.

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Table 8.
Manual (CECIC, 2020)

International research agreements deployed by UNSAM, active to March 2020. Source: Own elaboration, based on the Cuyo

Indicators
Total number of active research agreements entered into between the university and other institutions

Results
277

Active research agreements

Total number, by location of counterpart

Non-Latin American foreign countries

185

Number of specific mobility agreements,
according to location of counterpart

Latin American countries

Intergovernmental Organizations

Total number of mobility agreements

Percentage of mobility agreements with

88%

non-Latin American countries

Percentage of mobility agreements with

12%

Latin American countries

Percentage of mobility agreements with

Intergovernmental Organizations

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As for the counterpart institutions (Table 9), they mostly refer to academic institutions or
those linked to higher education (such as schools, institutes, faculties, foundations) and to a
lesser extent to NGOs, publishing companies, academic exchange companies, and public
management institutions (such as embassies or international relations departments).

Focusing specifically on institutions with an academic profile, we notice that UNSAM
encourages strong links with other universities, prioritizing those of state management located
outside the regional scope. In fact, 63% of the active agreements with academic counterparts

Table 9. UNSAM interinstitutional agreements according to type of counterpart institution and geographical scope, year 2020. Source: Own
elaboration, based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020)

Counterpart institutions
Latin American academic nonprofit organizations (excludes national)

Foreign nonprofit academic organizations (excludes Latin American)

Latin American companies (excludes nationals)

Foreign companies (excludes Latin American)

Latin American public agencies (excludes nationals)

Foreign public agencies (excludes Latin American)

Latin American public university institutions (excludes nationals)

Latin American private university institutions (excludes national)

Foreign public university institutions (excludes Latin American)

Foreign private university institutions (excludes Latin American)

Intergovernmental organizations

Total

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Number of agreements established

159

277

%
2

100

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Table 10.
based on the Cuyo Manual (CECIC, 2020)

Types of UNSAM agreements, according to geographical location of the counterpart institutions, year 2020. Source: Own elaboration,

Geographical location of counterpart
Latin American countries

Framework
73

Foreign countries (non-Latin American)

Transnational organizations

Total

107

186

Types of agreements

Specific (without reference
to mobility)
7

Specific (with reference
to mobility)
4

Total

185

277

correspond to foreign universities (non-Latin American) of public management and 4% to pri-
vate universities. As for the agreements with Latin American academic counterparts, 22% refer
to public universities in the region and 11% to private universities. (See data on agreements
broken down by country in the Supplementary material.)

Regarding the type of collected agreements, they are classified into “Framework Agree-
ments” and “Specific Agreements.” UNSAM’s Rector’s Resolution 137/08 identifies the first
group as a “mere intentions declaration” and the second as “agreements with specific obliga-
tions for the parts” (UNSAM, 2008, p. 6). Among the latter we can find the Specific Mobility
Agreements, which we will deal with here because they refer to the circulation of researchers.

Of the bilateral agreements examined, Table 10 shows that 32 correspond to Specific
Mobility Agreements (international), which is equivalent to 12% of the total. In terms of
geographical scope, 87% refer to mobility experiences with non-Latin American institutions
and only 13% to regional circulation. (See the Supplementary material for the countries to
which mobilities are designated.)

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5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Faced with the wide and diverse productions and research activities universe, developed in
different latitudes of the world scientific system, a set of macroindicators has been universal-
ized to measure and evaluate their quality/academic prestige. Focused almost exclusively on
publications in journals indexed in commercial databases and writing in English, these metrics
standardized an international quality regime of “scientific excellence” that is usually valued,
legitimized, and stimulated under these parameters in different universities and scientific orga-
nizations around the world.

The impact of these indicator systems, coming from countries considered central, was such
that the criteria for resource distribution in the field also began to depend on the particular
position that people, institutions, and countries occupied in these classifications.

Nevertheless, in recent times, several countries have advanced in the areas of editorial pro-
fessionalization of autonomous experiences, development of collaborative infrastructures,
information digitization processes, assemblies of national databases, and open access regula-
tions for publications, among other ways of weighting the diversity of knowledge produced
and which escape the international metric market. Indeed, open access to publications within
the more general framework of the Open Science movement is a current agenda item, shared
by an increasing number of universities, scientific organizations, and governmental and non-
governmental institutions.

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In Latin America, especially, experience with regional multibase information systems is
being developed that seeks to visualize the published scientific productions in the region in
order to promote its valorization in the evaluation systems. Examples of this are the Latin
American Observatory of Evaluation Indicators, OLIVA (Beigel, Packer et al., 2022) and the
Open Knowledge platform for Latin America and the Global South, AmeliCA (Becerril-García,
Aguado-López et al., 2018).

In effect, the wide discussion on the quality of scientific production in the “periphery,” as
well as its formats and ways of circulation, has stimulated a critical rereading of the particu-
larities in these academic circuits, assuming a deconstructive view of the “center–periphery”
binary and strengthening in turn the movement towards responsible metrics. Suffice it to point
out the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2012), the Leiden
Manifesto (Hicks, Wouters et al., 2015), and the aforementioned FOLEC-CLACSO experience
are fundamental milestones on the road towards the revision of the current global evaluation
system.

Indeed, more and more institutions and specialists (Babini & Rovelli, 2020; Beigel, 2019;
Rodríguez Medina, 2019; Vélez Cuartas et al., 2021, among others) are promoting the transi-
tion process from the model of internationalization of science, a tributary of hierarchies that
were consolidating on the basis of the mainstream publication system, towards inter- and intra-
national knowledge circulation. But for this to happen, it is also necessary to have new tools
for measuring the scientific production in the periphery.

In this context, as we have seen, CECIC has designed and implemented the Cuyo Manual
and its research circulation indicators. This is an alternative system of STI indicators that
promotes the recognition, and not mere measurement, of scientific production, but from
the periphery itself. Distancing itself from the internationalization paradigm and its respective
universalist parameters of science, this new social tool seeks to make visible both the inter-
national scope and the local anchors of peripheral scientific capital. In effect, each of its
analytical indicator blocks recovers all the interactions of scientific knowledge: local,
national, regional, transnational, and international. In particular, one of the innovations of
this multiscale circulation approach is that it revalorizes the “other” routes along which sci-
entific knowledge travels. In this sense, it contributes to dismantling the unidirectional
mainstream–periphery perspective, which is currently under global level revision, while at
the same time emphasizing the local/territorial component of scientific production, assuming
that these are promoted through the interaction between the university and its area of
influence.

Furthermore, considering that the knowledge generated in the periphery is of different types
and circulates in different formats and languages, the proposed circulation indicators help to
recognize the diversity and complexity of the knowledge that is produced and circulating, which
remains outside the realm of the published research harvested by the mainstream databases.

In this article we have presented, specifically, the main findings obtained in the first study
case conducted: that of UNSAM. Hence, we move forward by examining two major relevant
scenarios of knowledge circulation in the institution: its developed editorial capacities and the
scientific publications of its researchers, on the one hand, and its “other” research capacities
and interactions crystallized in the projects and their thematic-disciplinary agendas, scientific
event organization, and establishment of bilateral research agreements.

Regarding the main findings, even though UNSAM positions itself, and makes visible in its
reports, as an institution that is considered in terms of international standards of academic

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quality, in practice it permanently combines local and global resources based on its organiza-
tional itineraries and management politics.

In terms of editorial development, the institution has its own centralized repository but is
still disconnected intra- and interinstitutionally. It also has an important editorial function, and
publishes a series of digitized journals in Spanish, but without indexing. Thus, its editorial
capacity stimulates a local–national type of circulation in shich there is a clear predominance
of researchers in the Social Sciences.

However, when examining the scientific production published by is agents, we have
detected a strong tendency to circulate in mainstream journals, mainly indexed in WoS. In this
case, almost 80% of the publications shown in these databases correspond to researchers in
the Natural and Exact Sciences and Engineering and Technology.

It is worth introducing here some recommendations to the institution based on the indicator
analysis: expand the coverage of its repository by linking it to the curricular database in line
with the advances of the National System of Digital Repositories and taking into account the
CRIS system models and orient its journals towards regional circulation through their inclusion
in databases such as Latindex, SciELO or RedALyC and the incorporation of content in Portu-
guese, for example, or else, to integrate with the mainstream if indexed in WoS or Scopus and
promote publications in English.

Regarding the other actions and institutional capacities that the university has developed in
terms of knowledge circulation, we note that there is a diversity of research projects, but most
of them are accredited and funded by external agencies, such as R&D&I Agency and
CONICET, and, to a lesser extent, some have internal accreditation and institutional recogni-
tion (the PRIs). The former are reconverted into economic and cultural capital and the latter
into a type of intrainstitutional symbolic capital. Regarding research agendas, the university
has a strong orientation towards the hard sciences (which monopolize the majority of research
projects) and its geographical scales of approach do not refer to local or international studies,
but rather to national objects of inquiry or do not present a defined scale.

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As for scientific meetings, in contrast to the productions published, most scientific events
were carried out by researchers from the Social Sciences, and those of purely local or national
scope predominated. This is consistent with their publication circulation through alternative
circuits to the mainstream system, as well as numerous production of books and/or book chap-
ters. This leads us to think that for the Natural Sciences and other hard sciences, attendance
and participation at congresses or scientific meetings held in other latitudes is consistent with
the outstanding circulation rates of their work through publications in journals indexed in data-
bases such as WoS or Scopus, and preferably in English.

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Regarding the establishment of bilateral research agreements, UNSAM has a clear orienta-
tion to interact with academic institutions (mainly universities) over political or commercial
entities, in most cases located in European countries. In this sense, the directionality of the
circulation points strongly towards the internationalization of knowledge.

Based on the observations provided by the examined indicators, other proposals for knowl-
edge circulation politics also emerge: Promote a line of research projects financed by the uni-
versity that contemplate the articulation of scientific activities and projects integrated by
researchers from different careers and academic units; redefine research agreements to
broaden them to include social and/or technological linkages, promoting the participation
of researchers in local, Latin American, and other networks; and stimulate the realization of
transdisciplinary scientific meetings and from an “internationalization at home” approach, as a

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process opposed to the mercantilist and hegemonic tendency of internationalization, which
helps to recognize the potentialities of the realization of internationalization activities.

Finally, it should be noted that, although the article deals with a meso study, of an institu-
tional type, and therefore cannot be generalized as its conclusions are specific to one insti-
tution, we consider that they support the existence of certain trends in the circulation and
recognition of scientific capital developed in the periphery. We believe that the Cuyo Manual
and its circulation indicators show technical potential and acquire a critical conceptual
importance for peripheral academic communities, their institutions, and researchers, as they
allow reversing, converting, and discussing the filters and hierarchies established in the
funding and evaluation systems that have historically privileged some publication patterns
and languages, as well as circulation routes and formats, over others.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Víctor Algañaraz: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition;
Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Supervision; Writing—original draft.
Flavia Prado: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology;
Software; Writing—original draft; Writing—review & editing. María Pía Rossomando: Concep-
tualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Software; Writing—
original draft.

FUNDING INFORMATION
Fondo para la Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (http://dx.doi.org/10.13039
/501100006668).

DATA AVAILABILITY

All the supporting data for this article (i.e., entries, annotations and results) are visible in a more
detailed report by the Research Center on the Circulation of Knowledge (https://cecic.fcp
.uncuyo.edu.ar/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Estudio-de-circulacion-del-conocimiento
-producido-por-UNSAM-CECIC-EIDAES-2021.pdf; CECIC, 2021). The study is part of a larger
research project that includes the approach of 3 national universities. Therefore, in accor-
dance with the deadlines stipulated by Argentinan Law 26.899 of “Open Access Institutional
Digital Repositories”, the data will be available in the CONICET repository when the 3 studies
have been completed.

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