Astronomy in Colombia: a bibliometric perspective

In Colombia, astronomical research is experiencing accelerated growth. In order to better understand its evolution and current state, we conducted a bibliometric study using data from the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) and Web of Science (WoS). In ADS, we identified 422 peer-reviewed publications from 1980, the year of the first publication, until 2023, which was the cutoff date for our study. Among the 25 Colombian institutions identified as participants in at least one publication, the contributions of four universities stand out: Universidad de los Andes, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad Industrial de Santander, and Universidad de Antioquia, with 104, 78, 68, and 67 publications, respectively. By cross-referencing information from ADS and WoS, we found that the areas with the greatest impact in publications are threefold: high-energy and fundamental physics, stars and stellar physics, and galaxies and cosmology. Globally, according to WoS, Colombia ranks 52nd in the number of peer-reviewed publications between 2019 and 2023, and fifth in Latin America. Additionally, we identified three highly cited publications (top 1% worldwide) belonging to the field of observational cosmology. When analyzing countries with equal or greater bibliographic production, we estimate that Colombian production is approximately four times lower than expected considering its population and GDP.