National scientific performance evolution patterns: Retrenchment, successful expansion, or overextension

Abstract

National governments would like to preside over an expanding and increasingly high‐impact science system but are these two goals largely independent or closely linked? This article investigates the relationship between changes in the share of the world's scientific output and changes in relative citation impact for 2.6 million articles from 26 fields in the 25 countries with the most Scopus‐indexed journal articles from 1996 to 2015. There is a negative correlation between expansion and relative citation impact, but their relationship varies. China, Spain, Australia, and Poland were successful overall across the 26 fields, expanding both their share of the world's output and its relative citation impact, whereas Japan, France, Sweden, and Israel had decreased shares and relative citation impact. In contrast, the USA, UK, Germany, Italy, Russia, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, and Denmark all enjoyed increased relative citation impact despite a declining share of publications. Finally, India, South Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, and Turkey all experienced sustained expansion but a recent fall in relative citation impact. These results may partly reflect changes in the coverage of Scopus and the selection of fields.

The Scientific Impact Derived From the Disciplinary Profiles

“…To our satisfaction, the impact ranking derived from the (dis)similarities between disciplinary profiles was free from anomalies that traditional citation indicators typically possess. These results support an idea about a common route toward scientific excellence in which disciplinary peculiarities are supporting a general advancement (Bongioanni et al, 2014;Li, 2017;Thelwall and Levitt, 2018).…”

“…Another study analyzed 27 European countries across 27 disciplines over the period from 1996 to 2011 (Bongioanni et al, 2014 ). Thelwall and Levitt ( 2018 ) analyzed the relative citation impact for 2.6 million articles from 26 fields in the 25 countries published from 1996 to 2015. Pinto and Teixeira ( 2020 ) examined disciplinary profiles of 65 countries over a broad period of time (1980–2016).…”

Does the use of open, non-anonymous peer review in scholarly publishing introduce bias? Evidence from the F1000Research post-publication open peer review publishing model

“…For example, decisions are statistically significantly more positive for the UK and USA than for India. This aligns with previous research showing that there are international differences in peer review outcome for authors from different regions (Walker et al, 2015) and in the average citation impact of academic research (Smith, Weinberger, Bruna, & Allesina, 2014), although it is influenced by collaborations with higher income and researchintensive countries (Thelwall & Levitt, 2018). The main reasons cited for this potential inequality in research intensity and citation impact between countries include differing levels of financial support for research infrastructure, limited availability of mentors and experienced researchers, and the migration of highly skilled researchers to better-resourced economies (Xie 2014).…”

Worldwide bilateral geopolitical interactions network inferred from national disciplinary profiles

“…Almeida et al [36] as Bongioanni et al [22] examined disciplinary profiles of European countries across 27 disciplines. Thelwall and Levitt [37] analyzed 26 scientific fields in 25 countries and Pinto and Teixeira [27] examined disciplinary profiles of 65 countries over a broad period of time . Different works analyzed the 16 G7 and BRICS countries [21,35,38,39] exploring the disciplinary profiles of 45 countries.…”