News & Events

Globalization of Science

May 22, 2019 The study compares globalization of science across countries, disciplines and time in an interactive way. The more often researchers publish in the same journals as their peers abroad, the more globalized their research is.

 Science knows no limits or borders. Scientific inquiry has therefore gone global long before the economy or culture. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that science is global to the same extent everywhere.

To what extent are scientific outputs published in global as opposed to local journals? How does this differ across countries and disciplines? How much has this changed over the last decade?

The aim of this study is to show that. We provide new evidence on the globalization of science that allows us to compare over space, fields and time. Specifically, we compare 174 countries and various country groups in 4 broad and 27 narrow disciplines over the period from 2005 to 2017.

The study is based on six journal-level indicators of globalization. The benchmark indicators are derived from the data on authors by the country of origin. For comparison, we also use data on documents by the country of origin and English-written documents.

The journal-level indicators are then aggregated to countries and disciplines. These results are standardized between 0 and 1, in which 0 refers to the lowest and 1 to the highest globalization.

The analysis is based on data from the Scopus citation database. The list of journals and assigned disciplines is obtained from the Scopus Source List.

Globalization of science should not be confused with quality (or relevance) of science; they are likely to be related in many ways, depending on the discipline, but they are different phenomena.

The results are presented in an interactive manner that allows readers to customize the analysis. Further, the results should be of interest not only to academics, but also to policy-makers and to a broader audience across the globe.

To enter the application please click here GLOBALIZATION OF SCIENCE

Evidence from authors in academic journals by country of origin

Authors: Vít Macháček and Martin Srholec