Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2014 Dec 10;9(12):e113470. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0113470

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© 2014 Cimini et al

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.

PMC Copyright notice

The green line is a power-law correlation of the type , where is a constant and is the HERD. The best fit exponent is close to one ()—with correlation coefficient 0.97. Such relation simply implies that the output of the scientific research, measured by the number of citations, depends on the resources that a nation has invested in it. The nations above/below the fit (e.g., GBR, CHE, ISR, NZL above; JPN, CHN, MEX, TUR below) are the more/less efficient in their scientific production: a more refined analysis is then required to identify the structural reasons for these fluctuations.

Inline graphic — The green line is a power-law correlation of the type , where is a constant and is the HERD. The best fit exponent is close to one ()—with correlation coefficient 0.97. Such relation simply implies that the output of the scientific research, measured by the number of citations, depends on the resources that a nation has invested in it. The nations above/below the fit (e.g., GBR, CHE, ISR, NZL above; JPN, CHN, MEX, TUR below) are the more/less efficient in their scientific production: a more refined analysis is then required to identify the structural reasons for these fluctuations.