Analysis of G20 Countries in terms of Scientific Publication Performances

Abstract

The achievement of countries in generating scientific publications is also a reflection of their efforts in the scientific domain. The quantitative volume of these publications is not a criterion alone, but the fact that they are a source of inspiration for other scientists carrying out their studies in other countries is an important indicator in terms of evaluating the quality of publications. Based on this emphasis on scientific publications, this research aimed to assess the performance of nineteen G20 countries upon scientific publication data issued by The SCImago Journal & Country Rank and covering the years 1996-2022. The evaluation criteria do not only consist of the number of scientific documents, but also number of citable documents, number of citations, number of self-citations, number of citations per document and H-index values. Fuzzy Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (Fuzzy SWARA) method is employed to determine the priorities of the criteria with the participation of ten researchers from different scientific disciplines. As an outcome of the application of this method, the order of importance of the criteria is determined as H-index, number of citable documents, number of citations per document, number of citations, number of documents and self-citation. The performance order of nineteen countries is performed by using the CODAS-LN method, which includes a logarithmic normalization version of the COmbinative Distance-based ASsessment (CODAS) method and is a very convenient approach in cases where the data is not normally distributed. The results revealed that the United States has a superior position in terms of scientific publication performance, while the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and France are aligned in the top five order. The consistency of the applied method is also confirmed by two different sensitivity analyses.