Scientific wealth and inequality within nations

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that nations with higher scientific wealth tend to have greater inequality in the distribution of scientific excellence, with a concentration in a few top institutions, based on global citation data.

Contribution

It introduces a new analysis linking national scientific wealth to inequality in institutional scientific excellence using citation data.

Findings

Higher scientific wealth correlates with greater inequality in excellence distribution.

Scientific wealth leads to concentration of top institutions in a few countries.

Citation data effectively measures scientific wealth and inequality.

Abstract

We show that the greater the scientific wealth of a nation, the more likely that it will tend to concentrate this excellence in a few premier institutions. That is, great wealth implies great inequality of distribution. The scientific wealth is interpreted in terms of citation data harvested by Google Scholar Citations for profiled institutions from all countries in the world.