The productivity of Mexican astronomers in the field of outflows from young stars

We carry out a bibliometric study of the activity of astronomers in the field of Herbig-Haro (HH) objects. Through an appropriate choice of keywords, we recover the papers on HH objects from the ADS (Astrophysics Data Service) and ISI ("Web of Knowledge") databases. From the two databases we recover number of papers and citations which differ by similar to 10%. We analyze an 11-year period, restricting ourselves to authors with at least 10 papers within the period. We analyze the number of papers and citations, as well as the H index of this set of authors. Within this sample, we identify the authors belonging to Mexican institutions. We find that the Mexican researchers perform very well, having higher publication and citation rates than the ones of the full sample of authors active in the field of HH objects. The Mexicans have a degree of specialization (measured as ratios between the production in the chosen field and the total production of the individual authors) similar to the one of the full sample. They collaborate in somewhat larger groups than the authors of the full sample. Finally, we have carried out a study of the impact in the chosen field of different astronomical journals. We find that the Revista Mexicana de Astronomia y Astrofisica is well placed in the "second tier" of astronomical publications.