evaluation and promotion, institutional impact (for example the role of WoS in the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021), and international league tables (Bibliographic data from Scopus represents more than 36% of assessment criteria in the THE rankings). But while these databases are generally agreed to contain rigorously-assessed, high quality research, they do not represent the sum of current global research knowledge.

It is often mentioned in popular science articles that the research output of countries in South America, Asia, and