Quantifying progress in research topics across nations.

ABSTRACT: A scientist's choice of research topic affects the impact of their work and future career. While the disparity between nations in scientific information, funding, and facilities has decreased, scientists on the cutting edge of their fields are not evenly distributed across nations. Here, we quantify relative progress in research topics of a nation from the time-series comparison of reference lists from papers, using 71 million published papers from Scopus. We discover a steady leading-following relationship in research topics between Western nations or Asian city-states and others. Furthermore, we find that a nation's share of information-rich scientists in co-authorship networks correlates highly with that nation's progress in research topics. These results indicate that scientists' relat

SUBMITTER: Asatani K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10036561 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature