“Chilean Scientific Production cited by Public Policy Documents” is the name of the report published by the prestigious publisher Elsevier, in which UFRO is ranked fifth among the universities with the highest social impact through their research.

The SciVal platform carried out a detailed analysis of the performance of Chilean scientific productivity and its impact on public policies at the international level, based on data from 25,000 institutions in 230 countries.

The report states that public policy documents from 115 organizations in 28 countries mentioned Chilean research papers in 2022. The Ranking specifies that 113 out of 178 documents correspond to publications in open access journals and 92 of them have less than 10 authors. Among these documents, 128 are scientific articles. It is also worth mentioning that 73% of these papers are part of the 10% of the most cited publications worldwide. This is where Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) achieved fifth place in Chile, with the most scientific publications cited in international public policies.

According to Dr. Rodrigo Navia Diez, the vice-rector for Research and Graduate Studies of UFRO, this is a very important achievement, since it reflects the impact of the work developed at UFRO. “The first thing I want to point out is that this is a global ranking with Chilean universities. That means that our research is recognized internationally. According to this, in average 4% of our published papers are mentioned in public policy documents around the globe, and in different fields of knowledge,” he explained.

Among the fields of knowledge measured by the ranking, medicine stands out as the most cited field with 43%, followed by social sciences with 24.8% and environmental sciences with 20.4%.

“This fifth place shows that we are a university with a high-level scientific production,” added the vice-rector. In this context, he also explained that the main actions carried out to strengthen the fields of research, innovation, and graduate studies at UFRO is the support of new researchers who develop lines of research with a global scope and social impact.

The report specifies that the analysed Chilean universities published more than 500 documents in Scopus-indexed journals over the last five years (2018-2022), where UFRO stands out with 100 documents.