El lugar de la psicología en las investigaciones empíricas del suicidio en Argentina: Un estudio bibliométrico

Suicide is a major problem of public health lead ing to great economic, social, and psychol ogical costs worldwide. Around one million people die every year on the world due to suicide. Further-more, suicide is responsible for half of violent deaths worldwide exceeding even the combination of deaths due to war or homicide. Taking into account the above, researchers around the world recommended concerted efforts to generate actions, research, and investigation with the objective of reduce risk to suicide. Therefore, evidence from empirical research supporting public health policies and psychological treatments is needed. The present article introduces a biblio metric study aim ed to examine the state of empirical research on suicide in Argentina, and specially the amount of psychological empirical research. Specifically, research methodology consists of the following aspects: As regards the criteria of inclusion / exclusion of articles, the search focused on the detection of empirical suicide articles. In this sense, the main criterion for inclusion in the analysis was based on studies that have been published or were being published in scientific journals. For the aforementioned reasons, they were excluded from this study theoretical article, books, book chapters, theses, and confer ence presentation. Also, those articles that used the term suicide to address problems outside the addressed (e.g., Suicide Gene Therapy) were ex- articles published worldwide. The scientific research on suicide is even more critical in Argentina. Specifically, when considering publications on Scopus, LILACS and PUBMED, empirical research in this country represents only 1.41% of the extant literature on suicide. However, in recent years there have been an increasing number of publications from which may reflects a burgeoning interest in this topic. Results also indicate a greater collaboration be tween Argentina and other countries, particularly United States, as indicated by coauthorship studies (f = 6). Surprisingly, collaboration with (main producer of scientific articles in the South American region) is scarce (f = 2). Finally, take into account publications from in research data bases analyzed (Scopus, LILACS, and PUBMED) we note that most research on suicide has been published in medical journals (f = 30; 71.42%), while a lower number of articles has been published in psychological journals (f = 5; 1.19%). Globally, these results claim for more empirical research in suicide from psychologist, particularly in Argentina.