Results
A total number of 209,949 documents published between the years of
1996-2019 were analysed for this study. In that period of time, the
median number of documents per country was 1967.5 with an interquartile
range (IQR) of 6248.3. per OECD country, the median number of citable
documents was 1875 (IQR of 5957.8), the median number of citations per
document was 14.43 with an IQR of 8.42 and the median H index during the
study period was 67.5 with and IQR of 59.3. All bibliometric data
referring to each of the OECD countries are presented in Table
1 .
When equating academic parameters between the various regions, there was
a statically significant difference between Eastern Europe and North
American regions in the number of documents published, citable
documents, citations and H index in favour to North America (p=0.044 for
all data). Similar results were seen when comparing Eastern Europe to
the Asiatic Region (p=0.044 for all data). A statically significant
higher number of documents published, citable documents, citations,
citations per document and H index was shown in Western Europe in
comparison to Eastern Europe (p=0.005, p=0.005, p=0.001, p=0.016 and
p=0.001, respectively). When comparing publication data between Eastern
Europe to the Middle East, a significant difference in the number
citations and H index in favour of the Middle East region was found
(p=0.044). When comparing Western Europe to the Asiatic Region there was
a difference in citations per document in favour on Western Europe
(p=0.021) Table 2 .
When further dividing the OECD countries into native English speakers
versus non-native speakers, there was a statistically significant
difference in the number of citations (p=0.046) and H index (p=0.026),
with an advantage to native English-speaking countries Table 2 .
The various economic indicators for the OECD counties are represented inTable 3 . Correlations found between economic indicators and
scholarly productivity parameters are presented in Table 4 . A
strong correlation was found between health expenditure and H index
(r =0.734, p=0.000), a statistically significant moderate
correlation was found between health expenditure and number of documents
(r =0.572, p=0.000), number of citable documents (r =0.574
p=0.000) and number of citations (r =0.639 p=0.000). A
statistically significant moderate correlation was also fund between the
GERD as a percent GDP and the number of documents (r =0.471
p=0.004), number of citable documents (r =0.471 p=0.004), number
of citations (r =0.503 p=0.002), number of citations per documents
(r =0.518 p=0.001) and the H index (r =0.579 p=0.000). A
moderate association was found between GDP per capita and the H index
(r =0.459 p=0.005) and a weak correlation was found between the
GDP per capita and the number of citations (r =0.355 p=0.034). No
other statistically significant correlations between economic and
bibliometric indices were found.