The end of the "European Paradox"

This paper evaluates the European Paradox according to which Europe plays aleading world role in terms of scientiﬁc excellence, measured in terms of the number ofpublications, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the US to transform this excellentperformance into innovation, growth, and jobs. Citation distributions for the US, theEuropean Union (EU), and the Rest of the World are evaluated using a pair of high- andlow-impact indicators, as well as the mean citation rate (MCR). The dataset consists of 3.6million articles published in 1998&-2002 with a common 5-year citation window. Theanalysis is carried at a low aggregation level, namely, the 219 sub-ﬁelds identiﬁed with theWeb of Science categories distinguished by Thomson Scientiﬁc. The problems posed byinternational co-authorship and the multiple assignments of articles to sub-ﬁelds are solvedfollowing a multiplicative strategy. We ﬁnd that, although the EU has more publicationsthan the US in 113 out of 219 sub-ﬁelds, the US is ahead of the EU in 189 sub-ﬁelds interms of the high-impact indicator, and in 163 sub-ﬁelds in terms of the low-impactindicator. Finally, we verify that using the high-impact indicator the US/EU gap is usuallygreater than when using the MCR

The end of the "European Paradox" Articles