Peripheral Scientists, between Ariel and Caliban. Institutional Know-how and Circuits of Recognition in Argentina. The “Career-best Publications” of the Researchers at CONICET ^*

ABSTRACT

Argentina is a dynamic scientific field, dominantly public, having witnessed a three-fold growth in the number of full-time researchers over the past decade and the repatriation of over one thousand researchers that had emigrated in times of crisis. Meanwhile, there has been a simultaneous deepening of the polarization between internationalized scientists and those with a more endogenous orientation. Although autonomous and heteronymous trends coexist throughout the field, segmented scientific circuits have been consolidated revealing the dispute between two types of prestige: one international and the other local/national. In the first part of this article, I analyze the morphology of this double-faceted academic elite, describing its styles of production and circulation. In the second part, I focus on the internationalized profile, by means of an empirical study on the publications considered to be the “most relevant” by researchers on the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) when seeking for promotion.

Argentina; peripheral scientific field; evaluative cultures; scientific publications; academic elites