We propose a new method to assess the merit of any set of scientific papers in a given field based on the citations they receive. Given a citation indicator, such as the mean citation or the h-index, we identify the merit of a given set of n articles with the probability that a randomly drawn...

This paper evaluates the European Paradox according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, measured in terms of the number of publications, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the U.S. to transform this excellent performance into innovation, growth,...

Wide differences in publication and citation practices make impossible the direct comparison of raw citation counts across scientific disciplines. Recent research has studied new and traditional normalization procedures aimed at suppressing as much as possible these disproportions in citation...

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas – the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) – at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to...

This paper has two main aims: (i) to criticize the diagnosis about the research performance of the EU contained in the so-called “European Paradox”, according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the U.S. to...

This paper reviews scientific excellence in 38 countries and eight geographical areas using two sets of novel indicators of citation impact: a family of high-impact indicators imported from the poverty literature in Economics, and a set of indicators within the percentile rank approach. Among...