We identified 39 criteria for evaluating researchers and used for determine which Latin American countries employ which indicators, we built this dataset with such data as well as the most recent indicators available that are related to the number of researchers per million inhabitants (World Bank, 2020; CONCYTEC, 2019); the number of institutions ranked by Scimago in 2020 (Scimago Lab, 2020a); the percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) invested in science and development (World Bank, 2020); bibliometric data, including the number of indexed publications, citations and the h-index (Scimago Lab, 2020b); the number of peer reviewers and reviews conducted (Publons, 2020); altmetric data (Orduna-Malea and Delgado, 2019) the Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP, 2018); and the percentages of the population that are literate, has some schooling, and has a Bachelor's degree or equivalent (UNESCO, 2020). Not all data are available for Cuba and Dominican Republic in the cited sources, but they were still included.ReferencesCONCYTEC (2019) Perú destina US$ 31,2 millones para atraer investigadores residentes en el exterior. Available at: https://portal.concytec.gob.pe/index.php/noticias/1795-peru-destina-us-31-2-millones-para-atraer-investigadores-residentes-en-el-exterior (accessed 28 May 2020).

Publons (2020) Countries/Regions. Available at: https://publons.com/country/?order_by=top_reviewers (accessed 28 May 2020).

Scimago Lab (2020a) Scimago Institutions Ranking. Available at: https://www.scimagoir.com (accessed 28 May 2020).

Scimago Lab (2020b) Scimago Journal & Country Rank. Available at: https://www.scimagojr.com (accessed 28 May 2020).

The World Bank (2020) World Bank Open Data. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org (accessed 28 May 2020).

UNDP (2018) Human Development Index (HDI). Available at: http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/137506 (accessed 28 May 2020).

UNESCO (2020) UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Available at: http://data.uis.unesco.org (accessed 28 May 2020).