Science Rankings vs Sport Competitions

What would happen if sport competitions got replaced by science rankings? The answer is pretty interesting and easy to find, with just some coding (exploiting the inspirehep API)…It turns out that, for instance, nothing would change much for Italy, as its football performance ranks similar to its theoretical physics output… Even my former colleagues at Nordita — a very international research institute in Sweden — used to joke about the varying, yet often overwhelming, presence of Italians there.

However, other countries could better overcome the shame at kicking the ball, as they write more theory papers. This is the case for the US, China and UK, at the 1st, 2nd and 3rd positions respectively for number of papers over affiliated co-authors, in the hep-th category of ArXiv during 2023. Just below we find comparable results for India, Japan, Italy and Germany, all with around 300 papers / affiliated co-authors during 2023. The exact ranking is not clear, as some uncertainty ensues from the fact that about 20% of affiliation data is missing from Inspire's servers.

For equity I should mention at least one nation for each region. In South America the largest theory output is from Brazil (9th in the world), in the Middle East from Iran (14th), in Oceania from Australia (27th) and in Africa from South Africa (31st).

After this simple count for 2023, more interesting would be to compare the time evolution of the research output. More importantly, since not all papers are equally relevant and influential, the actual research impact should be gauged in terms of total citations for each paper and country…Stay tuned for that.

The Wolfram Language notebook for this analysis can be found at: github.com/Daniele-Gregori/ArXiv-Hepth-Data-Analysis