I've heard for example,that China is #2 for research. What does this mean? Does it mean that China is second in terms of how many peer reviewed journal articles they publish, or what? - Sol Lederman

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 highlighted in an analysis published this week by David King, chief scientific adviser to the UK government. Just 31 nations account for the top 1% of highly cited publications. South Africa, in 30th place, is the only African nation, and Iran, in 31st place, is the only Islamic nation, despite the high GDP of many Islamic countries. Sustainable economic development in highly competitive world markets, warns King, requires a more direct engagement in the generation of knowledge in these countries. With a nod to an article of similar scope by his predecessor Robert May (Science 275, 793–796; 1997), King looks at what different countries get for their research spending. King also highlights contrasting national strengths in various scientific disciplines within Europe — and the growing strength of the region as a whole. The scientific impact of nations DAVID A. KING What different countries get for their research spending. Nature 430, 311–316 (2004); doi:10.1038/430311a" - 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 Lindenbaum

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 Lindenbaum

Hooops, I remember now. I wrote a program for this a long time ago :-) I used it to create a new map in IBM ManyEyes ( http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeye... ) . The program is here: http://code.google.com/p... . Tell me if you cannot run it or if you have a specific query - Pierre Lindenbaum