Are scholarly articles disproportionately read in their own country? An analysis of mendeley readers

In theory, many areas of the natural and logical sciences, medicine, and social sciences are inherently international, with researchers collectively attempting to understand the world and building an edifice of knowledge through their published works. International collaboration has been found to be particularly successful in terms of increased citations to publications, which may have prompted its promotion by policy-makers and funders (e.g., Lasthiotakis, Sigurdson, & Sá, 2013). Nevertheless, it is not clear that the increased number of citations attracted by internationally collaborative research is due to its higher quality rather than to other factors, such as the nature of the problem addressed, or the amount of funding received. Hence it is important to investigate all factors that may explain the higher impact of internationally collaborative research. One such factor is the visibility of co-authored publications: in theory, internationally co-authored research may have an advantage because it may be noticed more in each of the countries of the authors. This hypothesis is investigated here. Although it is not possible to determine the nationality or country affiliation of all readers of academic articles, this article exploits a relatively new data source, Mendeley readers, to give new insights into the relationship between the nationalities of the users and authors of articles. The social reference sharing website Mendeley is free and allows people who sign up to list articles in their profiles that they have read, or intend to read, although no checking is done to verify that users are genuinely interested in their listed articles. Some users also register a country location in Mendeley and hence it is possible to cross-reference the countries of the readers of articles in Mendeley with the countries of the authors of those articles. This data is analysed for ten subjects,