Industry-research fronts – Private sector collaboration with research institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean

In which research fields is industry involved with research institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? To shed light on this question, we applied bibliographic coupling to 13,000+ research articles and 500,000+ references indexed in Scopus for 1996–2021 as a means of determining the research fronts in which LAC-based research institutions collaborated with knowledge-intensive companies. Fields with higher betweenness centrality were those multidisciplinary, followed by physical (e.g. computer science applications), life (e.g. genetics), health (e.g. public health, environmental and occupational health) and social sciences and humanities (e.g. strategy and management). Furthermore, the period-by-period analysis unveiled a focused venturing into the physical sciences from 1996 to 2002. However, from the 2003–2021 periods, the new fields explored were mainly in the social sciences and humanities. Finally, we identified several unexplored research fronts, particularly in health (e.g. care planning) and the social sciences and humanities (e.g. demography).