Research productivity- An analytical study of top 10 ranked countries

The present study deals with the research productivity of the top 10 ranked countries indexed in the SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SJR) database. The SJR database, which provides crucial scientometrics data for over 27,955 academic and professional journals based on data licensed from Elsevier’s Scopus database, is examined in this paper to analyze the top 10 ranked countries and the indicators, viz., documents published, citable documents, citation count, self-citations, citations per document, h-index, international collaboration, open access output, non-citable documents, percentage of the research output of the world, and external vs. self-cites. In this research, the country rankings of 2014 are considered for the study, and the data is retrieved from the SJR database for these countries from 2014 to 2023. The objective of this research is to assess the top 10 countries’ research productivity and the criteria used to rank the countries. The United States ranked 1st from 2014 to 2019, but China gained the top position since 2020 from the 2nd rank. India and China are the top countries with 12.93% and 11.39% annual percent growth rates in their research documents published from 2014 to 2023. The results of this study will be helpful for scholars and researchers across the globe to gear up their research to contribute to improving their country’s visibility globally and for policymakers regarding research fund allocation.