The Scientific Impact of Nations

Following up on yesterday's post, Chris pointed us to this (pdf) from Nature, 2004, called "The scientific impact of nations"; this study uses several different measures to determine a nation's scientific output. One measure is of citations per paper, adjusted for the particular field and year of publication, in an attempt to normalize results. This should give a good measure of the quality rather than quantity of a nation's scientific output, and avoid the problem of massive output of "papers on racism". For the years 1997-2001 (which would exclude the recent years in which Chinese science has allegedly accelerated), the list based on "rank order of nations based on share of top 1% of highly-cited publications" shows the U.S. at number one, and of the next 17, only Japan and Israel are not European.

Another ranking, the "citation rate per paper" shows Switzerland in first place, followed by the U.S., and of the top 20, again Japan and Israel are the only non-European countries.

In a measure of the ratio of all citations to per capita GDP, Switzerland came out way out in front, with the U.S apparently doing a little worse than the average. In other words, given our GDP, the U.S. ought to be producing even more highly-cited papers than it does.

But when compared to a group including the EU and the G8 nations, the U.S. produced more than 65% of the top 1% highly-cited publications.