What's New in Research: May 6, 2002
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Science in the United States, 1997-2001

The United States of America's world share of science and social science papers over the last five years, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 23 fields in the ISI database. Also, the U.S.A.'s relative citation impact compared to the world average in each field, in percentage terms.

Between 1996 and 2000, ISI indexed 1,226,946 papers that listed at least one author address in the United States. Of those, the highest percentage appeared in ISI-indexed journals of law. Social sciences, in fact, dominate the fields in which the United States is most heavily represented in the database. On the other hand, as the right-hand column shows, the relative impact of U.S. papers in law was just 10% above the citations-per-paper average for the world in this field (2.71 cites per paper for U.S. papers, versus 2.47 cites for the world), while U.S. papers in education scored 9% above the world mark. Thus, the two fields to which the United States contributed its largest percentages of papers also represent the nation's lowest marks in terms of relative impact. The situation was exactly opposite, however, in chemistry and other fields at the bottom of the list: although U.S. chemistry researchers contributed the smallest percentage of papers of any field shown here (well below the U.S.A.'s 34.60% overall share of the database), the impact of U.S. papers in chemistry was 52% above the world mark--the nation's second-strongest performance in terms of comparative impact (just behind the +58% figure in physics).

in-cites - an editorial component of ISI Essential Science Indicators from ISI^®
Citing URL: http://www.in-cites.com/research/2002/may_6_2002-2.html