Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Edited by Yu Xie, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved December 28, 2020 (received for review June 12, 2020)
Significance
By analyzing a global sample of 4 million authors and 26 million scientific papers, this study finds that the top 1% most-cited scientists have increased their cumulative citation shares from 14 to 21% between 2000 and 2015 and that the Gini coefficient for citation imbalance has risen from 0.65 to 0.70. The growing citation concentration should be understood in the context of diverging trends in publication and collaboration activities for the top 1% compared to the “ordinary scientist.” Our study raises intriguing questions about how rising inequalities will shape the evolution of science.
Abstract
Citations are important building blocks for status and success in science. We used a linked dataset of more than 4 million authors and 26 million scientific papers to quantify trends in cumulative citation inequality and concentration at the author level. Our analysis, which spans 15 y and 118 scientific disciplines, suggests that a small stratum of elite scientists accrues increasing citation shares and that citation inequality is on the rise across the natural sciences, medical sciences, and agricultural sciences. The rise in citation concentration has coincided with a general inclination toward more collaboration. While increasing collaboration and full-count publication rates go hand in hand for the top 1% most cited, ordinary scientists are engaging in more and larger collaborations over time, but publishing slightly less. Moreover, fractionalized publication rates are generally on the decline, but the top 1% most cited have seen larger increases in coauthored papers and smaller relative decreases in fractional-count publication rates than scientists in the lower percentiles of the citation distribution. Taken together, these trends have enabled the top 1% to extend its share of fractional- and full-count publications and citations. Further analysis shows that top-cited scientists increasingly reside in high-ranking universities in western Europe and Australasia, while the United States has seen a slight decline in elite concentration. Our findings align with recent evidence suggesting intensified international competition and widening author-level disparities in science.
Footnotes
↵1M.W.N. and J.P.A. contributed equally to this work.
- ↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: mwn{at}soc.ku.dk.
Author contributions: M.W.N. and J.P.A. designed research; M.W.N. and J.P.A. performed research; J.P.A. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; M.W.N. and J.P.A. analyzed data; and M.W.N. and J.P.A. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2012208118/-/DCSupplemental.
Data Availability.
Bibliometric data have been deposited in GitHub.com, https://github.com/ipoga/elite_citations (54).
Published under the PNAS license.
References
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Global citation inequality is on the rise
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