Countries pushing the boundaries of knowledge: the US dominance, China rise, and the EU stagnation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Rodriguez-Navarro, Alonso
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Rodriguez-Navarro, Alonso
author_facet Rodriguez-Navarro, Alonso
contents Knowing which countries contribute the most to pushing the boundaries of knowledge in science and technology has social and political importance. However, common citation metrics do not adequately measure this contribution. This measure requires more stringent metrics appropriate for the highly influential breakthrough papers that push the boundaries of knowledge, which are very highly cited but very rare. Here I used the recently described Rk index, specifically designed to address this issue. I applied this index to 25 countries and the EU across 10 key research topics, five technological and five biomedical, studying domestic and international collaborative papers independently. In technological topics, the Rk indices of domestic papers show that overall, the USA, China, and the EU are leaders; other countries are clearly behind. The USA is notably ahead of China, and the EU is far behind China. The same approach to biomedical topics shows an overwhelming dominance of the USA and that the EU is ahead of China. The analysis of internationally collaborative papers further demonstrates the US dominance. These results conflict with current country rankings based on less stringent indicators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Countries pushing the boundaries of knowledge: the US dominance, China rise, and the EU stagnation
Rodriguez-Navarro, Alonso
Digital Libraries
Information Retrieval
Knowing which countries contribute the most to pushing the boundaries of knowledge in science and technology has social and political importance. However, common citation metrics do not adequately measure this contribution. This measure requires more stringent metrics appropriate for the highly influential breakthrough papers that push the boundaries of knowledge, which are very highly cited but very rare. Here I used the recently described Rk index, specifically designed to address this issue. I applied this index to 25 countries and the EU across 10 key research topics, five technological and five biomedical, studying domestic and international collaborative papers independently. In technological topics, the Rk indices of domestic papers show that overall, the USA, China, and the EU are leaders; other countries are clearly behind. The USA is notably ahead of China, and the EU is far behind China. The same approach to biomedical topics shows an overwhelming dominance of the USA and that the EU is ahead of China. The analysis of internationally collaborative papers further demonstrates the US dominance. These results conflict with current country rankings based on less stringent indicators.
title Countries pushing the boundaries of knowledge: the US dominance, China rise, and the EU stagnation
topic Digital Libraries
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15263