Field rankings for Canada

	Field	Papers	Citations	Citations per paper	World average	% +/–
1	Space science	5,610	106,740	19.03	12.99	+ 46
2	Clinical medicine	86,384	1,379,868	15.97	11.66	+ 37
3	Physics	23,736	246,360	10.38	8.02	+ 29
4	Agricultural sciences	7,662	59,2	7.74	6.10	+
5	Pharmacology	6,111	82,905	13.57	10.83	+ 25
6	Chemistry	31,936	369,093	11.56	9.60	+ 20
7	Plant/animal sciences	30,853	249,712	8.09	6.83	+ 18
8	Environment/ecology	17,752	198,265	11.17	9.56	+ 17
9	Materials science	10,993	71,781	6.53	5.73	+ 14
10	Geosciences	17,910	171,518	9.58	8.46	+ 13
11	Psychiatry/psychology	16,351	179,179	10.96	9.72	+ 13
12	Computer science	11,586	39,944	3.45	3.08	+ 12
13	Biology/biochemistry	25,776	452,735	17.56	15.76	+ 11
14	Engineering	32,910	143,409	4.36	3.92	+ 11
15	Mathematics	11,850	39,394	3.32	3.00	+ 11
16	Microbiology	6,241	98,593	15.80	14.46	+ 9
17	Neuroscience	18,368	351,076	19.11	17.56	+ 9
18	Molecular biology	13,967	353,030	25.28	23.90	+ 6
19	Economics/business	7,973	41,580	5.22	5.04	+ 4
20	Immunology	5,267	105,742	20.08	19.95	+ 1

The data above were extracted from Thomson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators database. The database, currently covering the period January 1999 to April 2009, surveys only journal articles (original research reports and review articles) indexed by Thomson Reuters. Articles are assigned to a category based on the journals in which they were published and the journal-to-category field-definition scheme used by Thomson Reuters. Both articles tabulated and citation counts to those articles are for the period indicated.

Canada ranks seventh in output, sixth in citations received, and tenth in citations per paper (behind Switzerland, the US, Denmark, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, Sweden, Finland and Belgium respectively) across the science and social science fields surveyed in Essential Science Indicators. The table ranks fields for Canada by relative citation impact – that is, citations per paper for Canada in a field compared with the world’s citations per paper in the same field. Canada’s percentage above or below the world average is shown at the far right. The highest-ranked fields for Canada, according to this measure, are space science, clinical medicine and physics. In no fields did Canada’s performance fall below the world average.

For more on the Essential Science Indicators database, see: http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi