The most-cited nations

	Nation	Total papers	Cited papers	Per cent cited	Relative index	Impact rank
1	Denmark	50,224	37,394	74.45	1.17	2
2	Switzerland	96,306	70,517	73.22	1.15	1
3	Netherlands	131,977	96,446	73.08	1.15	4
4	Sweden	91,209	66,454	72.86	1.14	7
5	Scotland	56,154	40,475	72.08	1.13	3
6	England	360,910	256,640	71.11	1.12	6
7	Finland	45,702	32,460	71.03	1.11	11
8	United States	1,575,254	1,118,591	71.01	1.11	5
9	Belgium	73,141	51,697	70.68	1.11	8
10	Norway	38,900	,339	70.28	1.10	13
11	Germany	406,217	282,071	69.44	1.09	9
12	Canada	243,121	167,964	69.09	1.08	12
13	Austria	49,712	34,259	68.91	1.08	10
14	Italy	228,510	156,347	68.42	1.07	16
15	Australia	160,917	109,802	68.24	1.07	18
16	Israel	56,701	38,610	68.09	1.07	14
17	New Zealand	30,398	20,591	67.74	1.06	20
18	France	291,495	196,259	67.33	1.06	15
19	Ireland	25,371	16,974	66.90	1.05	17
20	Spain	183,542	121,934	66.43	1.04	19
21	Japan	388,706	257,510	66.25	1.04	22
22	Singapore	36,288	23,603	65.04	1.02	21
23	Portugal	34,797	22,456	64.53	1.01	24
24	Hungary	26,529	16,970	63.97	1.00	23
25	Greece	46,821	29,767	63.58	1.00	25
26	Argentina	30,6	18,996	62.74	0.98	26
	Czech Republic	36,679	22,715	61.93	0.97
28	South Africa	29,168	17,726	60.77	0.95	28
29	Taiwan	100,232	59,842	59.70	0.94	31
30	South Korea	157,045	90,842	57.84	0.91	29
31	Mexico	40,914	23,130	56.53	0.89	32
32	Poland	81,561	45,609	55.92	0.88	30
33	China	486,025	1,482	55.86	0.88	33
34	Brazil	118,239	64,701	54.72	0.86	34
35	India	162,100	87,512	53.99	0.85	35
36	Turkey	88,223	47,089	53.37	0.84	36
37	Iran	44,988	22,071	49.06	0.77	38
38	Ukraine	21,869	10,047	45.94	0.72	40
39	Russia	131,081	59,0	45.22	0.71	37
40	Romania	20,349	9,038	44.41	0.70	39

There are many measures that one can – and should – use to gauge national research performance. The table above ranks nations that produced 20,000 or more papers (articles and reviews) from 2005 to 2009 by their percentage of cited papers by the end of last year. Naturally, papers published in 2009 were less cited than those published in the earlier part of the five-year period. The longer that one permits citations to accrue, the higher the percentage cited will be. Thus, one should not conclude from the figures above that about 40 per cent of Taiwan’s papers are never cited – only that 60 per cent of the basket of papers from this five-year period were cited. It is simply a statistic to be used for comparisons.

Denmark, ranked first by this measure, saw 74.45 per cent of its 2005-09 papers receive at least one citation by the end of the period. This was 17 per cent above the world average, as indicated in the relative index column (where 1.00 represents the world average). Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Scotland rank second to fifth. By no means do the largest producers, such as the US (eighth) or China (33rd), dominate.

The final column shows the rank of each nation by its 2005-09 citation impact, which allows for a comparison of the relationship between the measure of per cent cited and citations per paper. The two measures, as can be seen, are related. Citedness represents another performance metric indicative of excellence.

The UK as a whole exhibited a 70.89 per cent citation score for the period. In terms of regions, the European Union, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East earned percentage-cited scores of 66.87, 60.05, 56.45 and 56.04, respectively, which correspond to relative index scores of 1.05, 0.94, 0.89 and 0.88.

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