How did Estonia become the world’s fastest-growing country in scientific wealth?

The concept of scientific wealth is defined as the average number of citations per paper published by scientists from a given country or territory over a fixed period. This analysis is based on data from Essential Science Indicators (ESI; ClarivateTM), which ranks authors, institutions, countries, and journals according to publication and citation performance between 2014 and 2024. Twenty years ago, Estonia’s scientific impact was 20% below the ESI world average. Today, the average citation rate of articles by Estonian researchers is 81.7% above the ESI world average, placing Estonia third globally, after Iceland and Singapore, and ahead of its Nordic neighbors and role models, Finland and Sweden. The rapid growth of Estonian science has yet to be fully explained. None of the four groups of factors analyzed ‒ science policies, funding, foreign aid, and research ethos ‒ can fully explain Estonia’s success on its own, especially when compared to its Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Lithuania. Estonia is a prime example of how a fortunate combination of factors can lead to the fastest growth in scientific wealth worldwide, although this specific combination remains to be identified.