The end of the "European Paradox"

This paper evaluates the European Paradox according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, measured in terms of the number of publications, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the US to transform this excellent performance into innovation, growth, and jobs. Citation distributions for the US, the European Union (EU), and the Rest of the World are evaluated using a pair of high and low impact indicators, as well as the mean citation rate (MCR). The dataset consists of 3.6 million articles published in 1998 2002 with a common 5 year citation window. The analysis is carried at a low aggregation level, namely, the 219 sub fields identified with the Web of Science categories distinguished by Thomson Scientific. The problems posed by international co authorship and the multiple assignments of articles to sub fields are solved following a multiplicative strategy. We find that, although the EU has more publications than the US in 113 out of 219 sub fields, the US is ahead of the EU in 189 sub fields in terms of the high impact indicator, and in 163 sub fields in terms of the low impact indicator. Finally, we verify that using the high impact indicator the US/EU gap is usually greater than when using the MCR.Ruiz Castillo also acknowledges financial help from the Spanish MEC through grant SEJ2007 67436Publicad