Revisiting country research profiles: learning about the scientific cultures

In the present work we analyze the Country Profiles, open access data from ISI Thomson Reuter’s Science Watch. The country profiles are rankings of the output (indexed in Web of Science) in different knowledge fields during a determined time span for a given country. The analysis of these data permits defining a Country Profile Index, a tool for diagnosing the activity of the scientific community of a country and their possible strengths and weakness. Furthermore, such analysis also enables the search for identities among research patterns of different countries, time evolution of such patterns and the importance of the adherence to the database journals portfolio in evaluating the productivity in a given knowledge field.