Our World
in Data
It’s Giving Season. Help us do more with a donation.
Data

Annual articles published in scientific and technical journals per million people

What you should know about this indicator

  • Scientific and technical journal articles per million people are calculated by Our World in Data based on article data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators, and population estimates from the United Nations World Population Prospects.
  • Patents are assigned based on the residence country of the first-named applicant.

Scientific and technical journal articles refer to the number of scientific and engineering articles published in the following fields: physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, clinical medicine, biomedical research, engineering and technology, and earth and space sciences.

The number of scientific and engineering articles published in the following fields: physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, clinical medicine, biomedical research, engineering and technology, and earth and space sciences. The NSF considers article counts from a set of journals covered by Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).

Annual articles published in scientific and technical journals per million people
Scientific and technical journal articles per million people. Disciplines include physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, clinical medicine, biomedical research, engineering and technology, and earth and space sciences.
Source
World Bank (2023); United Nations (2022) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 20, 2024
Next expected update
May 2025
Date range
1996–2020
Unit
articles per million people

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The World Development Indicators (WDI) is the primary World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources. It presents the most current and accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates.

Retrieved on
May 11, 2023
Retrieved from
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037712/World-Development-Indicators
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Development Indicators, The World Bank

World Population Prospects are the official estimates and projections of the global population that have been published by the United Nations since 1951. The estimates are based on all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality and international migration for 237 countries or areas. More details at https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/.

Retrieved on
September 9, 2022
Retrieved from
https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Online Edition.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Annual articles published in scientific and technical journals per million people”. Our World in Data (2024). Data adapted from World Bank, United Nations. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/scientific-publications-per-million [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

World Bank (2023); United Nations (2022) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

World Bank (2023); United Nations (2022) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Annual articles published in scientific and technical journals per million people” [dataset]. World Bank, “World Development Indicators”; United Nations, “World Population Prospects” [original data]. Retrieved November 28, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/scientific-publications-per-million