Who Publishes, Reads, And Cites Papers? An Analysis Of Country Information

The research field of altmetrics has gathered increased attention within scientometrics. Here, we pay particular attention to the connection between countries of readers of papers (at Mendeley) and countries of authors as well as citers of papers (from Web of Science). This study uses the Mendeley application programming interface to gather Mendeley reader statistics for the comprehensive F1000Prime publication set (n(r)=149,227 records, n(p) = 114,582 papers). F1000Prime is a post-publication peer-review system for papers of the biomedical research. The F1000 papers are rated by experts as good, very good, or exceptional. We find no significant differences between authorship, readership, and authorship of citing papers broken down into countries across quality levels. Most authors, citers, and readers are located in the USA followed by UK and Germany. Except for a few cases, we find that percentages of readers, citers, and authors are rather well balanced. Although Russia and China host many large research groups with a large publication output, both countries are below the top 10 countries ordered according to readership percentages.