Not everyone has noticed, also from our previous studies including a letter to Nature, that in the list of 100 000 most cited scientists by Ioannides et al. recently published in PLOS Biology, comparing the career database (1996-2017) with that of 2017, composed of around 2% of Italians, all the states we analysed except for Italy and China and India have suffered a decline in the number of researchers present in the 2017 data set compared to even substantial career data (Japan –20% nationally ). Italy is showing an opposite trend, showing + 0.2% on a global basis and an impressive + 11.53% on a national basis (Figure 2).
The advancement of China and India is impressive, registering a frightening (albeit expected) + 284% and + 152% respectively.