ScienceOnline09

There was a paper in Nature some years back that had a lot of information on this but I've struggled to find it I'm afraid. I think it depends a lot on whether you do it per capita and whether you include non-English language papers - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, thanks for the reply and insight. I'd like to find something recent as I bet China's numbers would be very different now than some years ago. - Sol Lederman

The recent Research Information Network report on scholarly publishing must have some of this information buried in the model that was developed somewhere. Not sure where (or if) the background research is available bu the report is detailed at http://www.rin.ac.uk/what-cost - Cameron Neylon

I would suggest hat you take a look at this paper: http://users.fmg.uva.nl/lleydes... , from one of the best scientometricians out there. - Enro

Did you look at the statistics available from NSF? This like something that would be in their stuff. I second Enro on L.L.'s work - Christina Pikas

@Enro - Excellent paper. Thank you. @Christina - Excellent suggestion to look at NSF stats. Thank you too. And, @Cameron - Thanks for the reference to the RIN report. - Sol Lederman

OECD also provide stats, including China. Only excerpts are free. http://www.oecd.org/documen... - Frank Norman

There was a paper by David King in Nature on the scientific impact of nations: http://www.nature.com/nature... which itself took off from Bob May's 1997 Science piece on the scientific wealth of nations - either of these is probably what Cameron is thinking of. "Scientific wealth of nations Chronic global inequalities in scientific productivity are... more... - Maxine

There are also annual stats put out by the Times (the THES I think) which are well-regarded in terms of international scientific output/ranking, I think they are more limited, eg to Universities, would need checking out. - Maxine

I guess you can quickly extract this information from pubmed. There is a field called "[PL]". (country of publication.) Here are the results I got: (France[PL] 2008[dp] := 13288 ), (France[PL] 2008[dp] := 13288 ) (Italy[PL] 2008[dp] := 7194) (Germany[PL] 2008[dp] := 44106) , (England[PL] 2008[dp] := 170476), (United-states[PL] and 2008[dp] := 350337 ) - Pierre

Use SCImago. China is #5: http://www.scimagojr.com/country... - Martin Fenner

For biomedical sciences: http://www.cotch.net/assed... <-- simply grabbed from PubMed affiliation fields (using http://www.cotch.net/assed...) - Joe Dunckley

note that PubMed's [PL] field tells you the location of the _publisher_, not of the _authors_ - Joe Dunckley

Nice to know, thank you Joe - Pierre

Another aspect of online communities that I think Bora points out well is that credibility has to be established here, over time and through interaction. This means that a brand new, unpublished person has the same chance to build a reputation as a well-funded, experienced scientist. I imagine for the latter this fact is discomfiting: having to start all over despite a credentialed... more... - Mickey Schafer

+1 Mickey. - D0r0th34

Really interesting point, Mickey! - Steve Koch

We decided to re-post this on my blog as well, for those who missed it first time around: http://scienceblogs.com/clock... - Bora Zivkovic