Ranking of Nations and Heightened Competition in Matthew Core Journals: Two Faces of the Matthew Effect for Countries

THEMATTHEWEFFECT FOR COUNTRIES (MEC) consists of the systematic deviation in the number of actual (observed) citations from the number of expected citations: Afew countries, expecting a high impact (i.e., a high number of cites per paper) receive a surplus of citations, while the majority of countries, expecting a lower impact, lose citations. The MEC is characterized by numerous facets, but two are the most impressive. The first is the possibility of ranking the science nations by their overall efficiency of scientific performance, thus making the MEC attractive for science policy. The second is the concentration of the MEC in a small number of scientific journals which happen to be the most competitive markets for scientific papers and, therefore, are of interest to librarians as well as scientists. First, by using an appropriate measure for the above-mentioned deviation of the observed from the expected citation rate one can bring the countries under investigation into a rank order, which is almost stable over time and independent of the main scientific fields and the size (i.e., publication output) of the participating countries. Metaphorically speaking, this country rank distribution shows the extent to which a country is using its scientific talents. This is the first facet of the MEC. The second facet appears when one studies the mechanism (i.e., microstructure) of the MEC. Everyjournal contributes to the MEC. The “atoms” of the MEC are redistributed citations, whose number turns out to be a new and sensitive indicator for any scientific journal. Bringing the journals into a rank order according to this indicator, one finds that only 144 journals out of 2,712 contain half of all redistributed citations, and thus Manfred Bonitz, Halbkreisstrasse 17, D-01187 Dresden, Germany LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 50, No. 3,Winter 2002, pp. 440-460 02002 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois BONITZ/RANKING OF NATIONS 441 account for half of the MEC. We give a list of these “Matthew core journals” (MCJ) together with a new typology relating the new indicator to the wellknown ones, such as publication or citation numbers. It is our hypothesis that the MCJ are forums of the fiercest competition in science-the “Olympic games in science” proceed in this highest class of scientific journals.