Scientific excellence

Yesterday we wrote about how international flows of scientific authors have changed from going to the US to going to China and the European Union. Today we look at an indicator of ‘excellence’: the percentage of scientific publications produced in a country that make it to the top 10% most cited papers in their respective scientific fields. The US long reigned at the top with about 15% of its scientific publications ending up in the top 10% most cited ones. However, the US has been overtaken by the UK. China and India have been making gains as well. Developing countries are improving the quality of their scientific publications either way, as the share of scientific publications from the OECD, a group of developed countries, is slowly dropping.