Paper detail

The USA is an indisputable world leader in medical and biotechnological research

A country's research success can be assessed from the power law function that links country and world rank numbers when publications are ordered by their number of citations; a similar function describes the distribution of country papers in world percentiles. These functions allow calculating the ep index and the probability of publishing highly cited papers, which measure the efficiency of the research system and the ability of achieving important discoveries or scientific breakthroughs, respectively. The aim of this paper was to use these metrics and other parameters derived from the percentile-based power law function to investigate research success in the USA, the EU, and other countries in hot medical, biochemical, and biotechnological topics. The results show that, in the investigated fields, the USA is scientifically ahead of all countries and that its research is likely to produce approximately 80% of the important global breakthroughs in the research topics investigated in this study. EU research has maintained a constant weak position with reference to USA research over the last 30 years.