Two separated worlds - on the international influence of life science and biomedical research

Abstract

AbstractWe have introduced a new metric, “citation enrichment”, to measure the country-to-country influence using citation data. This metric evaluates the preference of a country to cite the other country compared to a random citation process. We applied the citation enrichment method on over 14 million publications in the life science and biomedical fields and we have the following findings: 1) The globe is split into two separated worlds where developed western countries exhibit an overall mutual negative influence on the remaining of the world; 2) Within each world, countries form clusters based on their mutual influences and the classification fits perfectly to their geographical and cultural proximity; 3) The two worlds exhibit distinct patterns of the citation balance among countries. We have constructed a comprehensive world map of scientific influence which greatly enhances the deep understanding of the international exchange of scientific knowledge. The citation enrichment metric is developed under a well-defined statistical framework and it can be extended to a general and powerful tool for research in bibliometrics and related fields.