Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark Rank Highest In High-Impact Science

A trio of relatively small Western European nations heads a recently published list of countries that produce high-quality basic research. The study, undertaken by the Information Science and Scientometrics Research Unit (ISSRU) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, found that the scientists of Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark produced papers having significantly greater impact than expected, based on the average citation rates of the journals in which each paper was published. By t

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The ISSRU, using the data of the Institute for Scientific Information’s Science Citation Index for the period from 1981 to 1985, compared the actual number of citations per paper received by publications from a particular nation to the expected number of citations per paper. Citations were counted from 1981 to 1985, so that the effective citation period varies from zero to five years.

“The indicators so obtained,” write the study’s authors, “provide a complex measure of medium range citation impact and citation immediacy for a considerably large population of papers’ even for small countries” (T. Braun, W. Glänzel, A. Schubert, “The newest version of the facts and figures on publication output and relative citation impact of 100 countries, 1981-1985,” Scientometrics, 13 (5- 6), 181-8, May 1988).

The accompanying table lists the top 20 nations in the ISSRU’s ranked list of relative citation performance. The relative citation tation impact of 100 ...

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