Scientific Productivity of Leading Countries

The main aim of this study is to analyze and compare the scientific productivity of major countries. The related data are collected from Scopus through the open-access portal www.scimagojr.com. Data has been collected on the number of documents and their rank for the top countries. Bibliometric indicators such as Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and Activity Index (AI) have been used along with a simple percentage. Further, Pearson correlation has been used to compare the rankings. Twenty-four countries have at least 1% of global scientific output in 2018, and all these top countries also ranked in Nature Index 2019 except Indonesia and Malaysia. The top two countries, the United States and China, produced more than 600,000 documents in 2018, with others following distantly. The majority of the top countries are grouped under upper-middle and high income. Fifty percent of the top countries are from Europe. Tremendous improvement in terms of global rank from 1998 to 2018 has been observed for Iran, Indonesia, and Malaysia. All the top countries focus on different disciplines.