SciELO

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Latin America’s open-access flagship — the network the big commercial indexes under-count.

At a Glance

PublisherSciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), launched in Brazil in 1998 by FAPESP and BIREME
Coverage17 national and thematic collections spanning Latin America plus South Africa, Portugal, and Spain; 1,000+ active journals publishing roughly 50,000 articles a year, with a SciELO Preprints server
Accessfree and open (a diamond-OA model — free to read and, for authors, free to publish)
Regionalthe definitive index for Ibero-American and Global South research, multilingual across Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Our Take

SciELO is the single most important database for anyone researching Latin American public health, agriculture, social policy, or education — precisely because the commercial indexes barely see it. Latin America is only about 3.3% of Scopus journals and 4.9% of Web of Science, so for regional topics the big indexes systematically miss the literature, and SciELO is where it actually lives. It’s rigorously curated by national committees and fully open. The trade-off is scope: it’s regional by design and its citation tooling is lighter than the commercial indexes. For any regionally-grounded topic, search it directly rather than trusting a Scopus or WoS result to be complete.

Power Tips

  • For regional public-health, agriculture, or social-policy topics, search SciELO directly — the big indexes carry only a fraction of Latin American journals (Issue 3)
  • check the SciELO Preprints server for early regional findings; use the thematic public-health collection (SciELO Public Health) when that’s your field.

Alternatives & Complements

Redalyc · OpenAlex · DOAJ · LA Referencia · Latindex.