The role of public policies in the decentralization process of Mexican science and the formation of new researchers in institutions outside the Mexico City area

We analyze the scientific productivity of the public state universities that are located outside of the metropolitan area of Mexico City through the outputs of researchers who have the benefit of been “New Full Time Professors” (NFTP) of the “Faculty Improvement Program” (PRODEP). This program was designed by the Mexican government with special emphasis to support the creation of new full-time positions in these universities. A good proportion of professors hired as NFTP in the universities mentioned earlier became members of the national system of researchers (SNI, Sistema Nacional de Investigadores). As a consequence of these two public policies, SNI and PRODEP, our results show that research groups of these universities are reducing their science gap with respect to the stronger research institutions located in Mexico City in terms of the outputs that are being published in mainstream journals with high impact factors. We found that engineering is an area that has been mainly benefited with the PRODEP program in the period 2010-2015.