How does the Research Capacity Gap among Institutions Change over Time?

Recent investigation has reported that the richest 10% of the world population now owns 76% of all wealth due to COVID-19, indicating a wide gap between the rich and the poor across the globe (World Economic Forum, 2022). This disparity also prevails in science, where a few prominent institutions publish most impactful papers, while the rest majority are inconspicuous.

The number of top 1% papers published by an institution is a proxy of its research capacity. Generally, the distributions of top 1% papers by institution are skewed, which means a minority of elite institutions takes greater share (e.g. 20.4% elite institutions have published 80% of the top 1% papers in 2019, following the classical Pareto principle, which also known as “80/20 rule”). However, this disparity has a shrinking tendency in recent two years. In 2020, the proportion of top institutes publishing 80% top 1% papers has risen to 22.2%, and in 2021 this number leaps to 22.6%. A more rigorous approach is to observe the change of Gini Index. From our investigation, the Gini Index for distribution of top 1% papers in institution level has been rising continuously before 2019, but from 2019 to 2021 it decreases slightly from 0.744 to 0.725. Meanwhile, it could also be found that more institutions have participance in the global top 1% papers from 2011 to 2021 (see Figure 1; data from Web of Science Core Collection. Only institutes of first and corresponding authors are considered).

Figure 1

Though this shift could be mild in numbers, this tendency is a good sign, portending the research capacity gap among institutions has a potential to shrink. As the global scientific community is more diversified and inclusive, a more balanced and vibrant academia (instead of a polarized one) is in expectation.