Figure 1.

National expenditure on research and economic performance versus research productivity. a) Relationship for several Latin American countries between health research expenditure http://www.cohred.org/main/publications/backgroundpapers/FIHR_ENG.pdf and: i) journal articles on public health (triangles); ii) total public health research publications (crosses) indexed in LILACS-SP for 1980–2002) [45]. b) Relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) and biomedicine research productivity for three higher income countries and for Latin America (source: Falagas et al [37]).