The competitive advantage of nations: An application to academia

Within the field of bibliometrics, there is sustained interest in how nations “compete” in terms of academic disciplines, and what determinants explain why countries may have a specific advantage in one discipline over another. However, this literature has not, to date, presented a comprehensive structured model that could be used in the interpretation of a country’s research profile and aca‐ demic output. In this paper, we use frameworks from international business and economics to pre‐ sent such a model. Our study makes four major contributions. First, we include a very wide range of countries and disci‐ plines, explicitly including the Social Sciences, which unfortunately are excluded in most bibliometrics studies. Second, we apply theories of revealed comparative advantage and the competitive ad‐ vantage of nations to academic disciplines. Third, we cluster our 34 countries into five different groups that have distinct combinations of revealed comparative advantage in five major disciplines. Finally, based on our empirical work and prior literature, we present an academic diamond that de‐ tails factors likely to explain a country’s research profile and competitiveness in certain disciplines.