Publication: Differences in citation impact across countries
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2013-11
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Abstract
Using a large dataset, indexed by Thomson Reuters, consisting of 4.4 million articles
published in 1998-2003 with a five-year citation window for each year, this paper studies country
citation distributions in a partition of the world into 36 countries and two geographical areas in
the all-sciences case and eight broad scientific fields. The key findings are the following two.
Firstly, the shape of country citation distributions is highly skewed and very similar to each other
across all fields. Secondly, differences in country citation distributions appear to have a strong
scale factor component. The implication is that, in spite of the skewness of citation distributions,
international comparisons of citation impact in terms of country mean citations capture well such
scale factors. The empirical scenario described in the paper helps understanding why, in each
field and the all-sciences case, the country rankings according to (i) mean citations and (ii) the
percentage of articles in each country belonging to the set formed by the 10% of the more highly
cited papers are so similar to each other.
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Keywords
Citation impact, Country rankings, Country normalization, Citation inequality