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

Charles J. Gomez (), Andrew C. Herman and Paolo Parigi
Additional contact information
Charles J. Gomez: City University of New York
Andrew C. Herman: University of California
Paolo Parigi: Institute for Social Science Research (IRiSS) at Stanford University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, vol. 6, issue 7, 919-929

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01351-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:7:d:10.1038_s41562-022-01351-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01351-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().