Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the development of bibliographic tools increased: journals, catalogs, and classifications, which helped shape a world scientific order and the global colonialism that legitimized the canon of European science. Under this idea, the scientific production of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) registered in the Catalog of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society of London (CSP-RSL), during the nineteenth century, is reviewed. It seeks to document, through bibliographical sources, the historical process used to expand the European imperial science in America. A geohistoriometric proposal was used to develop geographic indicators of origin, trajectories, and training of the authors who wrote the LAC science. We also cross the information of these indicators of spatialization of human resources with historical scientometric measures of the scientific output of authors, languages, and journals. There is a proportion of just over two-thirds of authors, institutions, languages, and journals that are external to the countries of the LAC region. These geographic and scientometric indicators serve to document that both human and non-human actors have functioned as mechanisms of scientific communication to reproduce the ways of expanding imperial science to America. As a suggestion, we propose to continue the development of historical atlas of science in LAC.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acorn, J. (2009). Amateurs and abandoned science. American Entomologist, 55(2), 127–128.
Aiyepeku, W. O. (1976). The productivity of geographical authors: A case study from Nigeria. Journal of Documentation, 32, 105–117.
Allen, P. (1947). The Royal Society and Latin America as reflected in the Philosophical Transactions 1665–1730. Isis, 37(3/4), 132–138.
Arnold, D. (2001). La naturaleza como problema histórico. El medio, la cultura y la expansión de Europa. México: FCE. p. 131.
Atkinson, A. B. (1996). The case for a participation income. The Political Quarterly, 67, 67–70.
Avelino, F., & Rotmans, J. (2009). Power in transition: An interdisciplinary framework to study power in relation to structural change. European Journal of Social Theory, 12(4), 543–569. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431009349830.
Azuela, L. F. (1993). Imperialismo y ciencia. La Royal Geographical Society en el Perú (1880–1900). En P. Escandón y L. F. Azuela (coord.), Historia del quehacer científico en América Latina (pp. 75). México: UNAM.
Azuela, L. F. (2003). La Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, la organización de la ciencia, la institucionalización de la Geografía y la construcción del país en el siglo XIX. México: Investigaciones Geográficas.
Baldwin, M. (2015). Making nature. The history of a scientific journal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bazerman, C. (1984). Reporting the experiment. The changing account of scientific doings in the philosophical transactions of the royal society, 1665–1800 (pp. 59–79). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Camino-Carrasco, M. (2014). La imagen de los no europeos en las Philosophical Transactions (1750–1800). Recovered from https://www.academia.edu/11221157/La_imagen_de_los_no_europeos_en_las_Philosophical_Transactions_1750-1800_.
Capel, H. (1993). El asociacionismo científico en Iberoamérica. La necesidad de un enfoque globalizador. In A. Lafuente, A. Elena, & M. Luis (Eds.), Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Casson, L. (2016). Entomology around 1900: A science of amateurs? Gesnerus-Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Sciences, 73(2), 294–317.
Collazo Reyes, F., Luna Morales, M.E., Russell, J.M. & Pérez Angón, M.A. (2017). Emerging of the modern scientific discourse in the American continent: The case of knowledge claims in the discovery of Erythronium/Vanadium in Mexico (1802–1832). Scientometrics, 110(3), 1506–1521.
Conniff, R. (2016). Cazadores de especies. Héroes, locos y la delirante búsqueda de la vida sobre la Tierra. México: FCE. p. 67.
Cook, H. (2005). Global economies and local knowledge in the East Indies. Jacobus Bontius Learns the Facts of Nature. In L. Schiebinger & C. Swan (Eds.), Colonial Botany. Science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world (p. 100). Filadelfia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Csiszar, A. (2010). Seriality and the search for order: Scientific print and its problems during the late nineteenth century. History of Science, 48, 399–434.
Csiszar, A. (2017). How lives became lists and scientific papers became data: cataloguing authorship during the nineteenth century. BJHS, 50(1), 23–60.
Csiszar, A. (2018). The Scientific Journal. Authorship and the politics of knowledge in the nineteenth century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Cueto, M. (1986). La organización de una cultura científica en Lima: 1890-1930. Apuntes, 18, 130.
Delbourgo, J., & Müller-Wille, S. (2012). Focus: Listmania. Introduction. Isis, 103(4), 710–715.
Elliot, C. A. (1970). The Royal Society catalogue as an index to nineteenth-century American Science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 21(6), 396–401.
Flores Vargas, X., Vitar Sandoval, S. H., Gutiérrez Maya, J. I., Collazo Rodríguez, P., & Collazo Reyes, F. (2018). Geohistoriometric approach of the determinants of the emergence of modern scientific knowledge in mineralogy (Mexico, 1795–1849). Scientometrics, 115, 1505–1515. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2646-5.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings, 1972–1977. In C. Gordon (ed.); C. Gordon, L. Marschall, J. Mepham, & K. Soper (Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Gay, H. (2013). A Questionable Project: Herbert McLeod and the Making of the Fourth series of the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1901–25. Annals of Science, 70(2), 149–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2012.713512.
Heike, J., Livingstone, D. N., & Meusburger, P. (2010). Interdisciplinary geographies of science. In P. Meusburger, D. N. Livingstone, & H. Jöns (Eds.), Geographies of science (pp. 9–12). Berlin: Springer. ISBN 978-90-481-8610-5.
Helgerson, R. (1990). The land speaks: Cartography, chorography, and subversion in renaissance England. In: Trials of Authorship Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare. Jonathan Crewe. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Howsam, L. (2006). Old books and new histories. An orientation to studies in books and print culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
International Council of the Royal Society. (1904). International catalogue of scientific literature, Second Annual Issue. London: Harrison and Sons; International Council of the Royal Society.
Kammler, C. (2008). Wissen [Knowledge]. In C. Kammler, R. Parr, & U. J. Schneider (eds.), Foucaut Handbuch Leben. Weke wirkuy.
Keller, V. (2012). The “New World of Sciences”: The temporality of the research agenda and the unending ambitions of science. Isis, 103(4), 727–734.
Lewis, A. (2005). Gathering for the republic: Botany in early republic America. In L. Schiebinger & C. Swan (Eds.), Colonial botany. Science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world. Filadelfia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
López-Ocón, L. (1995). El nacionalismo y los orígenes de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima. In M. Cueto (Ed.), Saberes andinos. Ciencia y tecnología en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
López-Ocón, L. (2014). Geografía e interés nacional en Perú a través de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima (1888–1941). In S. Carreras & K. Carrillo Zeiter (Eds.), Las ciencias en la formación de las naciones americanas. Madrid y Frankfurt: Ibero-americana.
Meusburger, P. (2000). The spatial concentration of knowledge some theoretical considerations. Erdkunde, 54(4), 352–364.
Meusburger, P., Gregory, D., & Suarsana, L. (2015). Knowledge, action, and space: An introduction. In P. Meusburger, D. Gregory, & L. Suarsana (Eds.), Geographies of knowledge and power (pp. 1–18). New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9960-7.
Müller-Wille, S., & Charmantier, I. (2012). Lists as research technologies. Isis, 103(4), 743–752. https://doi.org/10.1086/669048.
Peet, R. (2015). Power/Knowledge/Geography: Speculation at the End of History. In P. Meusburger, D. Gregory, & L. Suarsana (Eds.), Geographies of knowledge and power (pp. 263–276). New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9960-7.
Piwowar, H. (2013). Value all research products. Nature, 493, 159.
Popper, N. (2016). Archives and the boundaries of early modern science. Isis, 107(1), 85–94.
Pratt, M. L. (2010). Ojos imperiales. Literatura de viaje y transculturación. México: FCE.
Raj, K. (2007). Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe 1650–1900, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
Royal Society of London. (1867). Preface, Introduction. Catalog of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society of London (1800–1863) (Vol. 1, pp. i–xi). London: Printed by George Edward Eyre and Williams Spottiswoode.
Royal Society of London. (1913). Catalog of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society of London (1867–1900). Index 1800–1905. London: Harrison and Sons, St. Martins Lane.
Schiebinger, L. (2004). Plants and empire. Colonial bioprospecting in the atlantic world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Secord, J. A. (2014). Visions of Science: Books and readers at the dawn of the Victorian age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sevilla, E., & Sevilla, A. (2013). Inserción y participación en las redes globales de producción de conocimiento: el caso del Ecuador del siglo xix. Historia Crítica, 50, 84.
Tabak, F. (2008). The waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870. A geohistorical approach. University Press. ISBN: 978-0-801-88720-8.
Taylor, P. J., Hoyler, M., & Evans, D. M. (2008). Geohistorical study of “the rise of modern science”: Mapping scientific practice through urban networks, 1500–1900. Minerva, 46, 391–410. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-008-9109-8.
Tilley, H. (2010). Global histories, vernacular science, and African genealogies; or, is the history of science ready for the world?. Isis, 101, 110–119.
Wolf, E. (2006). Europa y la gente sin historia. México: FCE.
Yale, E. (2016). The history of archives and the history of science. Introduction: Consider the archive. Focus. Isis, 107(1), 74–76.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge support from the project A1S9013 – CONACYT. We also appreciate the collaboration of Xochitl Flores Vargas (Cinvestav-IPN Programa DCTS) for their support in data handling and Gabriel Vélez Cuartas (Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia) for their helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gutiérrez-Maya, J.I., Collazo-Reyes, F. & Vega y Ortega Baez, R.A. The expansion of modern science through the Catalog of Scientific Papers, XIX century: the Latin American presence. Scientometrics 126, 2575–2593 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03606-2
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03606-2