The measurement of scientific excellence around the world

Abstract

This paper reviews scientific excellence in 38 countries and eight geographical areas using two sets of novel indicators of citation impact: a family of high-impact indicators imported from the poverty literature in Economics, and a set of indicators within the percentile rank approach. Among the main findings with a dataset of about 4.4 million from Thomson Scientific we emphasize the following three. (i) The proportion of articles of a research unit in the set formed by the 10% of the most cited papers in the world, and two important percentile rank indicators bring no novelty relative to a traditional average-based indicator. (ii) A high-impact indicator very sensitive to citation inequality is seen to be useful to detect success at a local level, but not for a global ranking that includes small research units. (iii) A monotonic high-impact indicator sensitive to any increase in citations is used to rank the partition of the world into 46 units in the 22 broad fields distinguished by Thomson Scientific, as well as the all-sciences case.