Leading countries in global science increasingly receive more citations than other countries doing similar research

2022/05/30 by Charles J. Gomez, Charles Gomez, Andrew C. Herman +2 · 190 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Psychology · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies #Geography #Law #MEDLINE #Political science #Psychology #Regional science #scientometrics and bibliometrics research

paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41562-022-01351-5

published in Nature Human Behaviour 6(7), 919-929 (Nature Portfolio)

openalex publication_date 2022/05/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Citations and text analysis are both used to study the distribution and flow of ideas between researchers, fields and countries, but the resulting flows are rarely equal. We argue that the differences in these two flows capture a growing global inequality in the production of scientific knowledge. We offer a framework called 'citational lensing' to identify where citations should appear between countries but are absent given that what is embedded in their published abstract texts is highly similar. This framework also identifies where citations are overabundant given lower similarity. Our data come from nearly 20 million papers across nearly 35 years and 150 fields from the Microsoft Academic Graph. We find that scientific communities increasingly centre research from highly active countries while overlooking work from peripheral countries. This inequality is likely to pose substantial challenges to the growth of novel ideas.

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