Abstract

The background of biotechnology and its different specialty fields is assessed from a bibliometrics perspective, in a developing country within the Latin American region; Venezuela. As methodology we adopted a specialty coding by colors, a technique referred to as ‘rainbow’ proposed by DaSilva in 2004. The study was limited to publications from Venezuelan institutions in the period comprised within 1970 and 2010. The documentary information was retrieved from a database built for studies of this kind, referred to as Biblios. This database consolidates most bibliographic references related to Venezuelan publications spread among major international and domestic databases. Strengths shown by this database include, among others, the fact that each entry has been assigned the relevant code as set by the UNESCO nomenclature for fields of science and technology. By correlating the rainbow coding against the UNESCO coding we have been able to evidence that although biotechnology represents a third of national capacities in sciences and technology, current Venezuelan capacities only include 5 of the 15 colors in rainbow.