International collaboration and counting inflation in the assessment of national research productivity

In this paper we describe how different accounting procedures affected the counting of scientific paper numbers at the country level and the country ranks based on paper production quantity in physics. Using 1989--2008 citation data, we also report the counting inflation ratio between different accounting procedures. We found that, in general, different accounting procedures yielded relatively similar and stable rankings. But for certain clusters of countries, the normal count procedure tended to favor the more advanced Western countries. In contrast, the newly developed countries received more credit in the adjusted and straight count procedures.