ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Global citation inequality is on the rise.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- The growing concentration of national influence in global science.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Research Progress, Challenges, and Future Trends of Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) Technology for Food and Agricultural Products: A Bibliometric Analysis (2016-2025).Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Article
- Orthopaedic publications receive fewer citations than general medicine articles: a scientometric analysis of temporal trends.Journal of orthopaedics and traumatology : official journal of the Italian Society of Orthopaedics and Traumatology · 2026Review
- Government policy documents across 185 countries largely cite Global North sources.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Structure of scientific knowledge flows to intergovernmental organizations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Prestige at Play: University Hierarchies and the Reproduction of Funding Inequalities.Canadian review of sociology = Revue canadienne de sociologie · 2026Article
- The power of citation: giving credit where credit is due.Disease models & mechanisms · 2026Article
- Brazilian science through the looking glass: a scientometric perspective from within and beyond.Brazilian journal of medical and biological research = Revista brasileira de pesquisas medicas e biologicas · 2026Article
- Opinion paper: generative AI and the future of scientometrics.Scientometrics · 2026Article
- Geographical diversity of peer reviewers shapes author success.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Composing authorship teams for health equity: an introduction to the health equity research production model.International journal for equity in health · 2025Article
- Does Excellence Correspond to Universal Inequality Level?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Network assortativity for a multidimensional evaluation of socio-economic territorial biases in university rankings.PloS one · 2025Article
- Technology and Innovation Has Made Impact Factor Redundant-Better Alternatives Are Here to Thrive.South Asian journal of cancer · 2025Article
- Field size as a predictor of "excellence." The selection of subject fields in Germany's Excellence Initiative.PloS one · 2025Article
- Collective dynamics behind success.Nature communications · 2024Review
- What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good?Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Machine learning misclassification networks reveal a citation advantage of interdisciplinary publications only in high-impact journals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.