As a way of contributing to the development of the social environment, an activity that is delegated to the Research Department of our institution.

At present, 60 projects are in execution for this academic period, 54 correspond to the VII call; 2 projects that are reactivated from the VI call; and 4 projects considered emblematic. (Graph) The projects of the VII call are related to the scientific and academic domains of our institution and have the purpose of solving real problems of the community. Aware of the great productive potential of our soil, most of the research projects are carried out on cocoa, coffee and banana, relevant and emblematic products of the province.

At UTEQ, research is carried out through the proposals presented by the research groups in the calls for proposals of the Competitive Fund for Scientific and Technological Research (Focicyt), a funding mechanism that allows the strengthening of scientific and technological research. The resources for its creation and permanence come from the university budget earmarked for research projects, for which a special item is created, in addition to the economic contributions established by current legislation, and other contributions and/or donations.

Scientific production Scientific production in the last five years has had an exponential development thanks to the support of the university authorities, the hard work and tenacity of the research professors; thus, we have several articles of worldwide impact published in journals with Scopus, ISI web, Web Of Science indexing, without forgetting the production in regional journals and participation in national and international scientific events. In 2015, we had 25 published articles of global impact while in 2019 we published 161 high impact articles, demonstrating that our university is committed to scientific development that benefits the people of Quevedo and the country.

The Academy of Sciences of Ecuador states that according to the Scopus database, approximately 93% of the total scientific production in Ecuador over the last 40 years is concentrated in the first 25 universities with the highest number of publications. Of these, 13 are public and depend significantly on the state. The reduction in the budget for higher education could have an adverse effect on the country's scientific development, but the excellent management of the university authorities has allowed the execution of research projects to continue to obtain results that are returned to the main actors who provide the basic information and disseminated through the different scientific journals. The institutional accreditation of CACES encourages us to continue with the continuous improvement of the quality of our research, to involve more and more the teaching staff, our undergraduate and postgraduate students in research tasks, optimising the use of our own resources and looking for new sources, sectors and schemes to obtain external resources that make research sustainable in all the areas of knowledge of the UTEQ.