Scientific research and new discoveries are made by scientists all over the world, but it seems not all research papers are seen as equal. In a new paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers say that the attention and recognition of scientific research is skewed by geography. 

Using data from millions of papers, the researchers found a wide discrepancy between citation of scholars from wealthier countries versus citation of scholars from poorer nations who study the same topics. For example, in aerospace engineering, scholars from the United States, Canada and the Philippines might all publish similar papers and should have comparable citations. However, the researchers found that only work from Canada and the U.S. was highly cited. 

The Journal Club of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) interviewed Misha Teplitskiy, assistant professor at University of Michigan School of Information, regarding the new paper. Teplitskiy says while the paper is a “nice contribution” to the field, the findings are strongly suggestive, but not definitive. 

“I see this as a brick in a fairly large set of bricks in a wall, trying to establish biases in recognition,” says Teplitskiy. 

He notes that additional experiments would help tease out biases in citation numbers. He suggests experiments that isolate specific factors might help clarify factors influencing citations, such as journal quality, language of publication, and author’s country affiliation. 

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Read “Wealthy nations rake in the citations while poorer countries go under-acknowledged” on pnas.org. 

Learn more about assistant professor Misha Teplitskiy.

Read the research paper “Leading countries in global science increasingly receive more citations than other countries doing similar research” in Nature Human Behavior.