The geography of references in elite articles: What countries contribute to the archives of knowledge
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This study is intended to find an answer for the question on which national "shoulders" the worldwide top-level research stands. Traditionally, national scientific standings are evaluated in terms of the number of citations to their papers. We raise a different question: instead of analyzing the citations to the countries' articles (the forward view), we examine referenced publications from specific countries cited in the most elite publications (the backward-citing-view). "Elite publications" are operationalized as the top-1 most-highly cited articles. Using the articles published during the years 2004 to 2013, we examine the research referenced in these works. Our results confirm the well-known fact that China has emerged to become a major player in science. However, China still belongs to the low contributors when countries are ranked as contributors to the cited references in top-1 perspective, the results do not point to a decreasing trend for the USA; in fact, the USA exceeds expectations (compared to its publication share) in terms of contributions to cited references in the top-1 Sweden, and the Netherlands also are shown at the top of the list. However, the results for Germany are lower than statistically expected.
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