An international comparison of journal publishing and citing behaviours

The relationship between researchers’ publishing and citing behaviours has received little examination despite its potential importance in scholarly communication, particularly at an international level. To remedy this we studied documents and their references indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science (WoS) in the period 2000–2009 to compare journal publishing behaviours against journal citing behaviours across the world. The results reveal that most publications in, and citations to, all five quality based strata of journals examined come from scientifically and economically advanced countries. Nevertheless, in proportion to their total number of citations given to WoS journals, it seems that less developed countries cite high-quality journals at the same rate as developed countries and so the poorer publishing of less developed countries does not seem to be due to a lack of access to top journals. Moreover, examining the publishing and citing trends of countries revealed a decreasing rate of high-income and Scientifically Advanced Countries (SACs) publications in, and citations to, all quality ranges of journals in comparison to the increasing rate of publications and citations of other groups. Finally, research cooperation between developed and less developed countries seems to positively influence the publishing behaviour of the latter as their publications co-authored with developed countries were published more often in top journals.

► We examine journal publishing and citing behaviours of authors and their relationship.
► We examine the effect of scientific collaboration among countries on their publishing and citing behaviours.
► We found that most publications in, and citations to, all journals examined come from scientifically and economically developed countries.
► We found that research cooperation between developed and less developed countries seems to positively influence the publishing behaviour of the latter.