UK punching further above weight on citation impact

By Paul Jump. UK research has higher citation impact than that of any comparator nation, a report commissioned by the government has revealed.
The report, published on 6 December, says that the average number of citations garnered by UK papers relative to the world average in their field – which is often used as a measure of quality - has been higher than that of papers from any other nation since 2008, and the gap is growing.
Produced by Elsevier and commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, it also shows that, by 2012, the citation impact of the nation typically regarded as producing the highest quality science, the US, had slipped behind Canada and was on a par with that of Germany and Italy. More...