Six measures of national research output, cumulative across three decades. Hovering any country shows all six.
Source: SCImago Journal & Country Rank, based on Scopus data. Figures are cumulative over 1996 to 2025, not annual. Documents are attributed to a country when at least one author holds an affiliation there, so internationally co-authored papers count for every country involved and national totals sum to more than the world total. Scopus coverage is uneven by language and discipline, favouring English-language journals and the natural sciences.
The first two metrics answer opposite questions and are frequently conflated.
Documents published measures scale. It rewards large, well-funded systems and correlates strongly with population and GDP. China and the United States dominate it, and will continue to.
Citations per document measures reception. It is close to size-neutral, which is why small countries appear near the top — Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Iceland routinely outperform much larger systems on this measure.
Switching between them reorders the map almost completely. Neither ordering is more correct; they measure different things, and a national research strategy pursuing one may well sacrifice the other.
The h-index sits between them. A country’s h-index is the number h such that it has published h papers cited at least h times each. It rewards sustained quality at scale rather than either alone.
The self-citation rate here is national, not individual: the share of a country’s citations that come from within that same country.
Some level is expected and legitimate. Researchers build on domestic work, national research programmes cluster around shared problems, and large systems naturally cite themselves more because there is more of themselves to cite.
But unusually high rates in smaller systems warrant a closer look. They can indicate insularity — research communities publishing in national journals, read mainly by compatriots, and disconnected from international debate. For emerging research systems in particular, a falling self-citation rate alongside rising output is a better sign of maturation than volume growth alone.
The figures are cumulative, not annual. Everything shown covers 1996 to 2025 in total. A country that has grown rapidly in the last decade appears smaller here than its current output warrants, because thirty years of history is baked in.
Co-authored papers count for every country involved. A paper with authors in Morocco, France and Japan counts once for each. National totals therefore sum to considerably more than the world total, and the more internationally collaborative a country’s research, the more this inflates its count.
Scopus coverage is uneven. It favours English-language journals, and the natural sciences over the humanities and social sciences. Research published in Arabic, French, Spanish or Chinese national journals is substantially underrepresented. A low figure may reflect indexing more than activity.
This measures publication, not knowledge. Scholarly output is one visible product of a research system. It is not a measure of research quality, of applied impact, or of whether the work addresses problems that matter locally.
Related work of mine on research systems and bibliometrics:
Data from SCImago Journal & Country Rank, based on Scopus. SCImago data is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence; the full dataset is available at scimagojr.com.