{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0194805","title":"The geography of references in elite articles: Which countries contribute to the archives of knowledge?","abstract":"This study asks the question on which national \"shoulders\" the world's top-level research stands. Traditionally, the number of citations to national papers has been the evaluative measures of national scientific standings. We raise a different question: instead of analyzing the citations to a countries' articles (the forward view), we examine references to prior publications from specific countries cited in the most elite publications (the backward-citing-view). \"Elite publications\" are operationalized as the top-1% most-highly cited articles. Using the articles published from 2004 to 2013, we examine the research referenced in these works. Our results confirm the well-known fact that China has emerged to become a major player in science. However, China still belongs to the low contributors when countries are ranked as contributors to the cited references in top-1% articles. Using this perspective, the results do not support a decreasing trend for the USA; in fact, the USA exceeds expectations (compared to its publication share) in terms of references in the top-1% articles. Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands also appear at the top of the list. However, the results for Germany are lower than statistically expected.","journal":"PLOS ONE","year":2018,"id":4136,"datarank":0.4887144807032224,"base_score":3.258096538021482,"endowment":3.258096538021482,"self_citation_contribution":0.4887144807032224,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.4887144807032224,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":25,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.0398,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2018-03-26","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":663,"name":"Loet Leydesdorff","orcid":"0000-0002-7835-3098","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":662,"name":"Caroline S. Wagner","orcid":"0000-0002-1724-8489","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":661,"name":"Lutz Bornmann","orcid":"0000-0003-0810-7091","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":53,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}