A new approach to the analysis and evaluation of the research output of countries and institutions

A plethora of bibliometric indicators is available nowadays to gauge research performance. The spectrum of bibliometric based measures is very broad, from purely size-dependent indicators (e.g. raw counts of scientific contributions and/or citations) up to size-independent measures (e.g. citations per paper, publications or citations per researcher), through a number of indicators that effectively combine quantitative and qualitative features (e.g. the h-index). In this paper we present a straightforward procedure to evaluate the scientific contribution of territories and institutions that combines size-dependent and scale-free measures. We have analysed in the paper the scientific production of 189 countries in the period 2006–2015. Our approach enables effective global and field-related comparative analyses of the scientific productions of countries and academic/research institutions. Furthermore, the procedure helps to identifying strengths and weaknesses of a given country or institution, by tracking variations of performance ratios across research fields. Moreover, by using a straightforward wealth-index, we show how research performance measures are highly associated with the wealth of countries and territories. Given the simplicity of the methods introduced in this paper and the fact that their results are easily understandable by non-specialists, we believe they could become a useful tool for the assessment of the research output of countries and institutions.