Abstract
Using the InCites tool of Thomson Reuters, this study compares normalized citation impact values calculated for China, Japan, France, Germany, United States, and the UK throughout the time period from 1981 to 2010. InCites offers a unique opportunity to study the normalized citation impacts of countries using (i) a long publication window (1981 to 2010), (ii) a differentiation in (broad or more narrow) subject areas, and (iii) allowing for the use of statistical procedures in order to obtain an insightful investigation of national citation trends across the years. Using four broad categories, our results show significantly increasing trends in citation impact values for France, the UK, and especially Germany across the last thirty years in all areas. The citation impact of papers from China is still at a relatively low level (mostly below the world average), but the country follows an increasing trend line. The USA exhibits a stable pattern of high citation impact values across the years. With small impact differences between the publication years, the US trend is increasing in engineering and technology but decreasing in medical and health sciences as well as in agricultural sciences. Similar to the USA, Japan follows increasing as well as decreasing trends in different subject areas, but the variability across the years is small. In most of the years, papers from Japan perform below or approximately at the world average in each subject area.
Highlights
Studies focusing on the international comparative performances of countries or territories have a long tradition
Two points should be considered in the interpretation of the results: (1) Larger citation impact differences between two following years for one country can rather be the effect of lower paper numbers than of significant performance differences
If we compare the results for the different subject areas in Figure 1 with the figures published by Marshall and Travis [3] and Adams [4] across all subject areas, the correspondence is largest for the natural sciences
Summary
Studies focusing on the international comparative performances of countries or territories have a long tradition. Leydesdorff and Wagner [1] ascertain that ‘‘the USA is still outperforming all other countries in terms of highly cited papers and citation/publication ratios, and it is more successful than the EU in coordinating its research efforts in strategic priority areas like nanotechnology’’ The Science and Engineering Indicators of the US National Science Board [2] report developments in international and US science and technology based on a comprehensive data base. This report shows that the combined share of published articles of researchers in the EU and the USA ‘‘decreased steadily from 69% in 1995 to 58% in 2009. With regard to citation impact, the analyses of the National Science Board [2] reveal that ‘‘U.S articles continue to have the highest citation rates across all broad fields of S&E’’ The USA has published 76% more articles than expected among the top21% most frequently cited articles in 2010; scientists from the EU have published top21% articles 7% less than expected
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