Pacific Rim countries now produce almost as many scientific papers, but the United States still holds an across-the-board edge in relative citation impact, according to the latest tally of 21 scientific fields by the ScienceWatch tracking service (www.sciencewatch.com). U.S. physics papers lead the field with an average of 6.15 cites each, compared with the world average of 3.96.
| TOP 10 FIELDS IN RELATIVE CITATION IMPACT, 2003-07 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. world share (%) | U.S. citation impact | Relative impact v. world (%) | |
| Physics | 23.26 | 6.15 | +55 |
| Chemistry | 20.70 | 7.33 | +52 |
| Materials science | 18.10 | 4.23 | +47 |
| Geosciences | 34.62 | 5.40 | +42 |
| Computer science | 35.27 | 2.10 | +40 |
| Microbiology | 34.01 | 9.90 | +39 |
| Clinical medicine | 36.92 | 7.84 | +36 |
| Biology/biochemistry | 37.10 | 10.33 | +35 |
| Space science | 49.17 | 10.48 | +34 |
| Pharmacology | 30.84 | 7.23 | +34 |
Comment: The United States publishes roughly half of the space science papers, and more than one-third of papers in a number of fields of science, while some four-fifths of papers in chemistry, physics and materials science are published elsewhere. We are betting heavily on the sciences from which technologies are emerging most rapidly.
On the other hand, the impact is higher in the fields in which Americans publish a smaller portion of the world's output. Go figure!
Of course, there are cultural differences among the scientific communities working on different sciences which may lead to different numbers of citations per paper published. JAD
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