Third World Research. Part 2. High impact journals, most-cited articles, and most active areas of research

Last week we reprinted the first part of the Magnus Pyke Lecture I delivered at the US Embassy in London last December. 1 The lecture was sponsored by the Science Policy Foundation, Ltd. (SPF), a nonprofit organization devoted to the study of the social impact of science and technology. The complete text of the lecture recently appeared in Science and Public Policy,2 an SPF publication. The first part of the lecture examined 353,000 articles indexed in the 1973 Science Citation Znde-# (SCF ) by the nationality of the first author. We found that 16,000 articles were authored in 93 Thkd World nations. The data showed that India was the “superpower” of Thwd World science—it accounted for half of all articles authored in developing countries, and 60 percent of all articles published in the Thkd World scientific press. But the average 1973 article authored by Indian scientists received only two citations from 1973 to 1978. In comparison, the small number of articles from Jamaica and Thailand averaged seven citations over the same period. However, the average article published in an Indian journal received only one citation, but this was enough to rank InAugust 22,1983