It has been repeatedly demonstrated that economic affluence is one of the main predictors of the scientific wealth of nations. Yet, the link is not as straightforward as is often presented. First, only a limited set of relatively affluent countries is usually studied. Second, there are differences between equally rich countries in their scientific success. The main aim of the present study is to find out which factors can enhance or suppress the effect of the economic wealth of countries on their scientific success, as measured by the High Quality Science Index ( HQSI). The HQSI is a composite indicator of scientific wealth, which in equal parts considers the mean citation rate per paper and the percentage of papers that have reached the top 1% of citations in the Essential Science Indicators ( ESI; Clarivate Analytics) database during the 11-year period from 2008 to 2018. Our results show that a high position in the ranking of countries on the HQSI can be achieved not only by increasing the number of high-quality papers but also by reducing the number of papers that are able to pass ESI thresholds but are of lower quality. The HQSI was positively and significantly correlated with the countries’ economic indicators (as measured by gross national income and Research and Development expenditure as a percentage from GDP), but these correlations became insignificant when other societal factors were controlled for. Overall, our findings indicate that it is small and well-governed countries with a long-standing democratic past that seem to be more efficient in translating economic wealth into high-quality science.
Only sufficient economic wealth can produce science with the highest quality. However, there is room for many intervening factors, which can moderate the process of how money invested into research transforms into a bibliometrically measurable outcome. In this paper, based on the latest update of the Essential Science Indicators (ESI), covering the period 2007-2017, we analyze the progress of Estonian science against the background less successful neighbors, Latvia and Lithuania, in the pursuit of scientific excellence. Estonia improved the impact of scientific papers by eleven positions occupying the 17th position in the world-ranking list of countries/territories, sandwiched between France and Israel who both have approximately two times larger DGP per capita to say nothing about 68 and 12 Nobel Prize winners respectively. By the percentage of papers reaching the topcited category, Estonia occupies the 7th position of the most successful nations. The fact that Estonian papers are cited 30% more frequently than papers recorded by ESI in general is a puzzle because Estonia is spending only about 0.8% of its GDP on the R&D with a dropping tendency during the last three years. Factors that could moderate transformation of the input money into scientific output are discussed.
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About five years ago, in 2011, Prof. Volli Kalm wrote a short review of the bibliometrical analysis of Oil Shale, an Estonian journal covering all aspects of science and technology related to oil shale. Now, a few years later, it would be good to take another, more up-to-date look at Oil Shale and its bibliometrical data to see how the journal's role and pertinent information have changed since 2011. In the last years, a lot has changed in bibliometrics and scientometrics. Bibliometrical analysis is still an everyday part of science and scientific analysis just as a peer review, but the range of bibliometrical indicators has widened from superficial indicators like citation count and h-index to more specific indicators like field-normalized citation rate and journal quartile score. These new indicators enable us to have a deeper insight into a journal's impact within its own field. Strong competition between Thomson Reuters Web of Science and Elsevier Scopus has made them two of the largest, most reliable and prestigious databases in the world. There is little doubt about the quality of information in these databases. The data contained may sometimes be different but this does not affect their overall value. Although criticized by some users for being more useful for those fields of research whose numbers of citations are higher, both have followed a fair and equal policy towards all of them. This short review of the bibliometrical indicators of Oil Shale was made using data from the following databases:
The disciplinary profiles of the mean citation rates across 22 research areas were analyzed for 107 countries/territories that published at least 3,000 papers that exceeded the entrance thresholds for the Essential Science Indicators (ESI; Clarivate Analytics) during the period from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2019. The matrix of pairwise differences between any two profiles was analyzed with a non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) algorithm, which recovered a two-dimensional geometric space describing these differences. These two dimensions, Dim1 and Dim2, described 5,671 pairwise differences between countries' disciplinary profiles with a sufficient accuracy (stress = 0.098). A significant correlation (r = 0.81, N = 107, p < 0.0001) was found between Dim1 and the Indicator of a Nation's Scientific Impact (INSI), which was computed as a composite of the average and the top citation rates. The scientific impact ranking of countries derived from the pairwise differences between disciplinary profiles seems to be more accurate and realistic compared with more traditional citation indices.
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