Geography in scientific practice and country biase

Recent decades witnessed a steady increase in international scientific collaboration, alongside debates on nationalist tendencies in scientific practices and global disparities in citation flows. Geographical proximity has been shown to influence collaboration and citation rates, yet how this affects global patterns remains unclear. Addressing this gap, we examine the interplay of geography and country-level effects in collaboration and citations using OpenAlex data. Analysing 1.6 million publications with 6.8 million collaborations, and 3.7 million citations, we unveil distinct distance dependencies and country-level effects. Collaborations between countries decline slower with distance compared to intra-country collaborations. Surprisingly, citations between countries display lower distance dependence above a certain threshold, while intra-country citations decrease notably. These findings suggest that geographical factors alone do not determine inter-country collaborations and citations, hinting at underlying country-level effects that we will explore further in follow-up research. This study advances our understanding of the complex dynamics shaping international scientific engagement.