The contribution to highly cited articles by authors from BRIC countries

Jianfang Wang *, Jonathan M. Levitt **

* and

The National Science Library, ChineseAcademy of Sciences, 33 Beisihuan Xilu, Beijing, 100190(P.R.China)

Visiting academic, Department of Information Science, University of Loughborough, Ashby Road, Loughborough, LeicestershireLE11 3TU (UK)

** and

Department of Information Science, University of Loughborough, Ashby Road, Loughborough,LeicestershireLE11 3TU (UK) and

School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, WolverhamptonWV1 1LY (UK)

Introduction

As emerging countries, BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) show remarkable progress in many science indicators, including publications or citation impact. UNESCO Science Report(UNESCO, 2010) pointed out, for the BRIC countries, their share of world publications had shown an impressive growth, with the exception of Russia.

Research of the Royal Society (2011) showed, over 35% of articles published in international journals were internationally collaborative. Kostoff(2007) found that about a quarter of the papers attributed to Chinawere actually the results of international collaboration. Of the total papers published by Indian researchers from 1997 to 2007, 15 percent were the product of international collaboration (National Research Council, 2010). In search of the relationship between international collaboration and citation impact, positive correlations have been found in various regions and research fields(Figg, 2006). Another investigation by Glanzel(1999)concludedthat international collaborationwas particularly advantageous for less advancedcountries, but also beneficial for highly industrialised countries.

In scientific performance evaluation, for internationally collaborative publications, often full credit is given to every author of the article. However, not all authors contributed the same to the research. As collaboration correlates with high citation, one could hypothesise that the highly cited BRIC articles may mostly be internationally collaborative research. This study seeks to investigate this hypothesis.It focuses on the following issues: a) How does the citation levels of BRIC countries compare with those of more developed countries; b)for the most highly cited articles with BRIC authored, to what extend do BRIC countries benefit from their cooperation with leading scientific countries.

Method

Firstly, this paper compares the scientific performance of BRIC with some developed countries. To get a five year citation window, we started from the set of all articles published in 2007 indexed by SCI. For the first 14 most productive countries which include all BRIC countries, we take the number of citations of the articles in the 99th, 95th, 90th, 75th and 50th percentiles to compare the citation impact. Percentile means a citation threshold at which a fixed fraction of papers fall. Secondly, for every highly cited article, we counted the number of authors from different countries. Then we calculated the percentage of native authors from BRIC countriesto determine to what extent do BRIC countries contribute to these important scientific results. In this research, we also calculated the Spearman Correlation between number of articles and citations at certain percentile, citations and percentage of author affiliations from the BRIC country.

Findings

In terms ofall SCI articles published in 2007，China, India, Russia and Brazil respectively rank 2,10,13,14 in the world. But when the citations received by these publications are taken into account, there are marked differences in the citation profiles between BRIC countries and other countries. For example, the citation level of the 99th percentile is lower for BRIC countries than for the other top 14 most productive countries (e.g., 115 for USA, 62 for China, 53 for Brazil, 50 for Russia, 47 for India). The same results can be found in other percentiles. A spearman correlation testbetween number of articles and citations at each percentileshows a low correlation. This indicates that countries with output can have relatively low levels of citation. In essence this is the antithesis of the Matthew Effect.

In internationally collaborative papers, not all countries made an equal contribution to the research. The percentage of authors from one country may to some extent illustrate the contribution of that country. Hence we calculated the percentage of authors from each BRIC country for the top 30 and 10% highly cited articles with at least one author from these countries. In the datasets oftop 10% highly cited articles, China includes the most of 9214 articles, Brazil, Russia and India respectively have2247, 2450, and 3144 articles.

Table 1: Distribution of percentages of affiliations from BRIC country

Fraction of affiliations from BRIC country / Brazil / China / India / Russia / BRIC
Less than 1/10 / top 30 / 43.3 / 36.7 / 26.7 / 50.0 / 39.2
top 10% / 4.8 / 1.4 / 2.5 / 10.0 / 3.3
1/10 to 1/5 / top 30 / 30.0 / 6.7 / 16.7 / 26.7 / 20.0
top 10% / 6.8 / 2.3 / 2.5 / 8.7 / 3.8
1/5 to 1/2 / top 30 / 6.7 / 10.0 / 10.0 / 10.0 / 9.2
top 10% / 19.5 / 11.4 / 9.3 / 35.4 / 15.5
1/2 to 3/5 / top 30 / 6.7 / 23.3 / 10.0 / 3.3 / 10.8
top 10% / 12.2 / 12.0 / 10.2 / 20.6 / 12.9
3/5 to all / top 30 / 3.3 / 10.0 / 3.3 / 6.7 / 5.8
top 10% / 9.0 / 8.3 / 4.5 / 7.4 / 7.6
All from BRIC / top 30 / 10.0 / 13.3 / 33.3 / 3.3 / 15.0
top 10% / 47.8 / 64.6 / 71.0 / 18.0 / 56.9

Table 1 summarized the distribution of percentages of affiliations. The upper limit of each fraction is not included in the corresponding percentage. For example, at the fraction of ‘less than 1/10’, 43.3% of the top 30 highly cited articles of Brazilactually only have less than 1/10(1/10 in not included) of authors from Brazil. As showed in Table 1, articles with all authors from each BRIC country account for a very small proportion in the top 30 highly cited articles(33% for India, 13% for China, 10% forBrazil, and 3%for Russia), but with the top 10%, a greater proportion of articles don’t involved international collaboration. Taking BRIC countries as a whole, for the top 30 highly cited articles,39.2% of them have author percentages from BRIC country of less than 10%; for the top 10%, international collaborative articles account for nearly 50%. Here we can infer that, for the most highly cited articles we often attributed to BRIC countries, they seem likely often not to have contributed much to the research.

For each BRIC country, we calculated the Spearman Correlation between the times cited with the percentage of authors from these countries. For the top 30 highly cited articles, China and India have statistically significant correlations between the number of citations and the percentage of authors from the country, respectively -.43 (p = .02) and -.53 (p < .01). The results indicate, the less highly cited articles were included, the more significant negative correlations could befound.

Conclusion

This study indicates that, although BRIC countries have become major players in scientific research, in terms of citation impact, their performance is not very strong compared to some leading scientific countries. For influential research, indicated by highly cited articles, authors with BRIC affiliations seem to have contributed relatively little. For the top 30 highly cited articles, only a quarter of the corresponding authors are from BRIC countries, and the majority of articles had less than 50% of the author affiliations from the BRIC country. These results indicate that although the scientific publications of BRIC countries have increased rapidly, their contribution to very highly cited articles may be somewhat limited.

In our further research, we will investigate in more detailhow BRIC countries benefit from internationally collaborated research, and to what extent do the benefits impact on citation impact.

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the China Scholarship Council. We thank Gertrude Levitt for her numerous suggested improvements to the English used.

References

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