Science Ranking of Countries

Now that the new feature of adding charts to blogs has been released, I decided it would be appropriate to release a blog on a chart I created about a month ago.

SCImago Institutions Rankings looks specifically at the number of quality publications each country contributes each year. These scientific publications cover a variety of fields, from physics and mathematics to medicine to earth sciences.

Over the past twenty years, the United States has dominated the field, out-producing every country by a long shot, but gradually China has risen in the ranking and as of last year (2020) officially overcome the US, producing over 20,000 more articles. Meanwhile, the rest of the scientific world has gradually followed about the same trends over the last twenty years.

This chart of course does not cover every top scientific country over the past twenty years. For example, Canada was ranked ahead of Italy for most of the early 2000s.

Other noteworthy developments not seen from this chart include countries which have seen significant development over the last twenty years, such as Malaysia who had only 1751 publication in 2000, but increased by an annual average of over 100% each year to almost 40,000 publications last year.

But perhaps the most impressive is Indonesia who had 771 publications in 2000, but published 50,145 just last year. That's an average of a 320% increase each year.