Context:

The present research is related to the number of publications and citations in computational science in South America in the last twenty years. The measurement of scientific production is of great impact in order to evaluate the production of a country, as well research groups, authors and university centers, among other aspects.

Method:

The research is classified as a longitudinal descriptive comparative study. The information was collected from the SCImago Journal & Country Rank platform, where the variables evaluated correspond to the different topics related to the area of computer science. The statistical processing of the information was carried out by means of the cluster technique, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), Biplot analysis by the Procrustes method, complemented with the nonparametric technique of Spearman. The SAS University statistical package was used.

Results:

Brazil is statistically different from the other nations of the southern part of the American continent in terms of scientific dissemination in the area of computer science. There is a directly proportional relationship between the different topics evaluated, the highest correlation between nations was between Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela.

Conclusions:

Brazil is the South American country with the highest number of publications and citations in the different areas of computer science, followed by Argentina, Colombia and Chile, where the topic with the highest impact corresponds to applied computational sciences and the lowest is related to human-computer interaction.