• 2008
• Domain
• Exhibit map

Kevin W. Boyack and Richard Klavans create maps of science that serve as a platform for planning and evaluation on the national, corporate, and personal levels. Traditional methods of comparing scientific strengths of nations are based on counting papers and citations within journal categories. However, journal category structures are too coarse to accurately show the strengths of smaller nations. Journal-based methods also fail to show the subdisciplinary or multidisciplinary nature of many countries’ strengths. In this map, Boyack and Klavans introduce a method to identify and visualize research leadership using a classification system in which millions of research papers are segmented into over 80,000 clusters. These 80,000 building blocks are individually reassembled for each nation to reveal their areas of research leadership. Analysis of the top-13 publishing nations shows that this new method for measuring research leadership gives a much more accurate and detailed accounting of the actual scientific strengths of nations than does the journal-based method. In particular, the strengths of small nations, along with subdisciplinary and multidisciplinary strength, are more accurately identified using the new method. Overlaying U.S. strengths with those from the top-12 competitive nations shows the areas in which those nations have a leadership role that is not matched by the U.S.