aa r X i v : . [ c s . D L ] A ug The decline of astronomical research in Venezuela
N´estor S´anchezUniversidad Internacional de Valencia (VIU), SpainAugust 12, 2020
During the last 15 years the number of astronomy-related paperspublished by scientists in Venezuela has been continuously decreas-ing, mainly due to emigration. If rapid corrective actions are notimplemented, Venezuelan astronomy could disappear.
Although its first steps date back to the XIX century, it can be said that As-tronomy in Venezuela started in the 1970s with the construction of the NationalAstronomical Observatory and the foundation of the Centro de Investigacionesde Astronom´ıa (CIDA) created to manage the Observatory [1]. During the1980s, Venezuela was strengthening and consolidating this research field un-til becoming a very competitive country in Latin America, only behind thefour countries with the longest astronomical tradition in the region: Argentina,Brazil, Chile and Mexico [2, 3].Since 1999 Venezuela started a transformation process, the “Socialism of the21st century”, led by the State. Since then, a considerable debate remains be-tween supporters and detractors of the Venezuelan government about whetherthe change has been for better or for worse, in a deeply polarised country [4].Science and Technology have been part of this process and, obviously, have alsosuffered from such a polarisation. While some authors consider that Venezuelangovernment is backing science and that, despite the political crisis, the total in-vestment has been continuously increasing [5, 6, 7], other researchers claim thatbudget cuts, discretionary use of resources (on the basis of political loyalty) and,in general, the economic, political and social crisis are seriously damaging sci-entific research in Venezuela [8, 9, 10]. Apart from the existing polarization, theeconomic crisis makes things difficult. Almost all research funding comes fromthe State but most of the budget goes to pay salaries and only a small percentageis left for infrastructures, graduate or postgraduate programmes and researchprojects [11]. Payments are made in local currency (bol´ıvar) that suffers highinflation and there is an exchange control system that prevents unauthorized (by1enezuelan government) access to foreign currency. All this makes it difficultto researchers and institutions to buy needed resources (materials, equipments,books and journals) or to participate in international events and, additionally,makes Venezuela unattractive as a destination for foreign researcher or studentmobility.An apparently undeniable reality is that, whatever the underlying reasons,Venezuelan scientists (by this I mean scientists based in Venezuela and workingfor a Venezuelan institution, irrespective of their nationality) are emigrating ataccelerated rates [12, 13] and, as a consequence, scientific production (publishedpapers) has been decreasing over the last years [14]. The brain drain seemsto be similar in magnitude for all fields of knowledge [13] and for VenezuelanAstronomy in particular has meant a setback of about 20 years.
40 years of Astronomy in Venezuela
According to the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) [15], between theyears 1980 and 2019 inclusive, a total of 798 refereed papers in the astronomycollection (excluding proceedings and book chapters) were published with atleast one author affiliated to a Venezuelan institution. Table 1 summarizes themain characteristics derived from these publications.
Main research networks
Stellar, Galactic and Extragalactic Astronomy 37.3%Relativistic Astrophysics (and Theoretical Physics) 31.1%Atomic Physics 7.4%Fluid mechanics 6.3%
Main journals
The Astrophysical Journal 25.2%Physical Review D 10.3%Astronomy and Astrophysics 8.8%Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 8.0%Astrophysics and Space Science 5.9%Classical and Quantum Gravity 5.5%General Relativity and Gravitation 4.8%The Astronomical Journal 4.1%
Main research centres
Centro de Investigaciones de Astronom´ıa (CIDA) 29.9%Universidad de Los Andes (ULA) 22.2%Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) 16.3%Universidad Sim´on Bol´ıvar (USB) 13.7%Instituvo Venezolano de Investigaciones Cient´ıficas (IVIC) 11.2%Table 1: Main characteristics of Astronomy/Astrophysics research in Venezuela(years 1980-2019). 2y checking out these publications and using other ADS tools, it is pos-sible to identify four main (not the only ones) research networks. i.e., groupof authors sharing papers and/or research lines. The most important networkis related to what we could call “traditional” Astronomy, with a bulk of pa-pers dealing with Stellar Astronomy (including young stars and variable stars),Galactic Astronomy (including stellar clusters) and Extragalactic Astronomy.This research was published in standard astronomical journals (especially TheAstrophysical Journal) and it was carried out at CIDA (mostly) and ULA. Thereis a second important but completely different network whose major researchline is Relativistic Astrophysics (relativistic fluids), although this network alsoincludes several papers and authors working in different areas of TheoreticalPhysics and publishing, logically, in different journals, especially Physical Re-view D. Authors in this network belong to the following institutions (in order ofcontributions): UCV, ULA, USB and IVIC. These two main networks accountfor almost 70% of the total Astronomy research in Venezuela in the last 40years. There are, however, two smaller but very well-defined research networks:one refers to Atomic Physics (atomic data for astrophysics) with researchersmainly working at IVIC, and the other refers to Fluid Mechanics (applied toastrophysical plasmas) with researchers mainly at ULA. There are other insti-tutions, in particular universities, doing some research in Astronomy, but theirtotal contributions (refereed papers) are always below ∼ . ∼
25 papers/year, a ∼ ∼
20 years ago). Interestingly, publications inAstronomy started decreasing several years before total scientific publicationsin Venezuela that, according to Science Citation Index and Scopus, starteddecreasing in 2008 [14].
Venezuelan astronomers are emigrating
By using the full list of papers (and ADS tools), I searched for the main Venezue-lan astronomers/astrophysicists. By “main” I mean authors who published atleast 10 papers betweem 1980 and 2019 or, if not fulfilling this condition, whohave an average publication rate ≥ . ∼
65% of the paperspublished during the last 40 years. The number of years of author’s activityranges from 8 to 40 (still working in Venezuela) following a roughly flat distri-3 N u m be r Year
Papers in AstronomySmoothed 3-year average rateEmigration-corrected average rateNumber of main authors
Figure 1: Evolution of Astronomy research in Venezuela. The histogram is thenumber of refereed papers with at least one author affiliated to a Venezuelaninstitution and the black line is a smoothed version (3-year bin-averaged data)that better shows global trends. Red line indicates the total number of mainauthors (see text) that were active per year, which started to decrease in 2009due to emigration of astronomers. Blue line is the estimated production if therehad been no emigration flow.bution. Their mean publications rates ranges from 0.5 to 3.5 papers/year with47% of the authors publishing more than 1 paper/year and only 13% more than2 papers/year (on average).Once identified these main authors, we use the ADS to verify whether, aftertheir last active year, they have or have not continued publishing with affiliationto a different country. Since 2007, 12 of the main authors have emigrated toother countries (Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Spain and USA), 5 have stoppedpublishing at all (retirement or unknown reasons) and 2 have passed away.There are still 11 active researchers in Venezuela, though I know for sure thatat least 4 of them are actually living abroad but they still sign papers withaffiliation country Venezuela. The number of active authors per year is plottedas red line in Figure 1. The emigration process started in 2007 but the number ofnew main authors increased until 2008, so the net number of active researchersstarted decreasing since 2009-2010. The number of main authors in 2019 is onlya 38% of the historical peak value in 2009. Remarkable is the fact that thereare no new main astronomers in Venezuela since 2008, based on the mentioned4 N u m be r o f pape r s Year
VenezuelaColombiaEcuadorPeruUruguay
Figure 2: Comparison of publications in the area of Physics and Astronomy inVenezuela with those in other countries in Latin America according to SCImagoJournal & Country Rank.criteria of having an average production rate higher than 0.5 Astronomy-relatedrefereed papers per year.What has been the real impact of the emigration of Venezuelan astronomers?By knowing the mean production rates and emigraton years for each of the 12emigrated authors, the total mean production rate can be corrected by emigra-tion (blue line in Figure 1). Despite the yearly variations, the corrected numberof papers per year remains nearly constant over the last 10 years around 33 . Venezuelan Astronomy is falling behind
A direct comparison with other Latin American countries clearly illustrates thegradual destruction of scientific research in Venezuela. Figure 2 shows the num-ber of papers in Physics and Astronomy for some selected countries (excludingthe top 4 countries in Astronomy research in Latin America). The data was re-trieved from SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Venezuela is the only countrythat has inverted the general growing trend and Colombia, Ecuador, Peru andUruguay have already surpassed Venezuela in number of papers per year. Par-ticularly notorious is the case of Colombian Astronomy [16], for which a clear5lope change can be seen that it has positioned in the fifth place in the regionsince 2005.In terms of production rate (papers per year), Venezuelan Astronomy is atpresent equivalent to that ∼
20 years ago. The number of papers depends almostexclusively on the number of researchers [17]. So, the true problem of Venezue-lan Astronomy is not the current production rate but the fact that Venezuelanscientists are emigrating and this emigration is far from being stopped. Ac-cording to data from World Bank the total population in Venezuela started todecrease for the first time in its history, from an historical maximum of ∼ ∼ . . ∼ . ∼ . .
500 peoplewere killed (homicides committed by criminals, caused by “resistance to author-ity” or violent deaths of undetermined intent), placing Venezuela as the countrywith the highest per capita murder rate in Latin America. Under this scenario,to define new science policies and/or to notoriously increase the assigned budgetin order to improve infrastructures or graduate and research programmes is notgoing to revert the situation. Deeper changes must be undertaken to addressthe underlying causes. Venezuela’s political, economic, and social crisis has tobe overcome in the first place. After that, it will probably take a long time torecover what Venezuela once had.
References [1] Martinez Picar, A., & Salas Ramirez, H. Proceedings of the InternationalMeteor Conference, 25th IMC, Roden, Netherlands, 2006, 24 (2007).[2] Hearnshaw, J. IAU Special Session, 5, 9 (2007).[3] Ribeiro, V. A. R. M., Russo, P., & C´ardenas-Avenda˜no, A. Astron. J.146