Replication Data for: The Growing Concentration of National Influence in Global Science and Its Impact on Future Research.

A small group of prominent countries is disproportionately and increasingly influencing scientific discourses. Concentrated influence in science could stifle sustained innovation and exclude researchers in countries often relegated to the periphery of global science. To demonstrate the imbalance of national influence, I focus on a field’s concepts and ideas that originate from researchers in one country and are then used by researchers in other countries. Text is the best medium where these scientific concepts and ideas reside as terms that can be extracted at scale. I construct yearly international networks of term-based knowledge diffusion between the years 1990 and 2012 for 165 academic fields based on nearly a quarter million sets of scientific terms. I use 30 million scientific papers published from two metadata repositories of scientific publications, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar Academic Graph. I measure misalignments between these diffusion networks and their corresponding citation networks that reflect the recognition of international influence. I find that both are consistently and strongly aligned. However, it is where knowledge originally diffuses from that reveals a growing and concentrated imbalance in national influence, in particular from the United States.