A Well-Behaved Population: The Chilean Scientific Researchers of the XXI Century and the International Regulation

In Chile, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the State’s scientific and higher education institutions (CONICYT, Fondecyt, National Quality Assurance System) and universities have established criteria and procedures for evaluating the scientific production that have consolidated an orientation of research activities towards the international mainstream, expressed mainly in journals indexed as WoS and Scopus, and also, for the social sciences, in those indexed as SciELO, although with less force. This configuration of national criteria and procedures articulated with international indexations can be considered a device for regulating the conduct of the scientific researchers population in the country. After a couple of decades in operation, the results show significant increases in scientific productivity, measured with such criteria of the global mainstream, which are notoriously superior to other Latin American countries. These data and a study on Chilean researchers, based on a probabilistic survey, show an internationalized population, fundamentally connected with the central countries, of Europe and the U.S.A., and only secondarily with others in the region. This is a population that self-regulates, with increasing effectiveness, its scientific activity according to the orientations of that regulation device: it is a “well behaved” population.