Scale, style and spread of global institutional research

Abstract

Most research in the world is organized around institutions which can be categorized as belonging to different sectors, e.g. higher education, government, health, etc. In this article we have evaluated how countries share and spread their research efforts across these sectors. This is made possible because the Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR) uses a five-sector classification of the leading 5362 research institutions in the world. It is shown that each country has its distinctive style of sharing and spreading its research efforts across major sectors. Some countries are similar to others (e.g. Spain and the Netherlands, or Iran and Turkey), while some are very different from each other (e.g. Spain and Iran). Various row-wise and column-wise operations on a country- sector matrix allow us to quantify and visualize these styles and spreads, and measure their shares of the global institutional research efforts.