There is a concern that the pressure to increase the number of papers in high impact factor journals could be detrimental to the quality of research, and therefore, to the impact that it might have in the international scientific community. In this work, we have done a scientometric and statistical analysis of published articles by Argentine, Brazilian, Chilean, and Mexican ecologists from 1975 to 2015, to test this hypothesis. H-index values (which measures an article’s number of citations and total items published) were recorded in the top 10 journals for each country. While the number of publications grew exponentially in these four countries since 2000, we observed that the number of citations decreased markedly, which is to say that promoting scientific productivity by stimulating an increase in the number of publications in high impact factor journals, the dominant scientific policy in many Latin American countries, does not necessarily reflect greater insertion into the international scientific debate, but rather the current scientific policies have produced the opposite outcome. Publishing fewer papers, but with greater quality and depth, or perhaps dedicating ourselves to strengthening scientific and technological systems that are linked with local and regional needs (and evaluated accordingly), could be an alternative, but wiser, path to build a regional ecology with greater global impact, relevance, pertinence and visibility.