About ResearchBoard
A free daily board of the world's research output — how much is published, where, by whom, and what is being cited.
What ResearchBoard is
ResearchBoard follows global science the way a stock-market board follows prices. Every day it counts the research papers published worldwide and shows them by country, university, journal and field, together with citations and the most-cited papers and scientists. It is free, has no adverts, and is built entirely on open data.
It is made for researchers, students, librarians, journalists, universities and anyone curious about where science happens.
Where the numbers come from
- OpenAlex — a free, open catalogue of the world's research (papers, authors, institutions, journals and topics), run by the non-profit OurResearch. Papers, countries, institutions, journals, fields and citations come from OpenAlex.
- PubMed — the database of medical and life-science literature run by the US National Library of Medicine. We count the records added to PubMed each day (by entry date).
Both sources are public. We collect from them automatically once a day; nothing is typed in by hand.
What we count
- Papers: journal articles, reviews, preprints, letters, conference papers and book chapters, by their publication date. Datasets, errata, peer reviews and similar records are left out.
- Countries and institutions: a paper counts for a country or university when at least one of its authors works there. A paper by an international team therefore counts for every country involved, so country totals add up to more than the world total.
- Fields: each paper is counted once, under its main field (OpenAlex topics).
- Citations made: the number of references listed in the day's new papers — how many times new research cited earlier work.
- Most-cited papers and scientists: total citations in OpenAlex; daily gains compare today's totals with the previous day's.
Why the daily report is about 3 days behind
Journals and databases keep reporting papers for several days after they are published, so a day's count keeps rising for a while. To avoid showing half-finished numbers, each Research Report covers the newest day that is fully counted — usually about three days ago. A day counts as complete once it has reached the level that the same weekday normally reaches. Weekends always have fewer papers than weekdays.
For what happened in the last day, see Research trends: it compares the running total of recent papers between two updates about 24 hours apart. If the source database has not been refreshed, or makes an unusually large correction, that day's change is not shown rather than shown wrongly.
What we publish
- Daily Research Report — papers, PubMed records, citations and top countries for the latest fully counted day (website and social media).
- Research trends — papers added to the global record in the last 24 hours.
- Spotlights — themed top-10 rankings: countries, universities, journals, fields, rising countries, papers and scientists.
- Country and university pages, the world research map and site search — papers per day for 200+ countries and hundreds of universities and institutes.
- Bangladesh daily update on Facebook — the last 24 hours of Bangladeshi research.
- Blog — data guides that update every day, and practical guides for researchers and students.
Full methods
Exact definitions, rules, whole and fractional counting, limitations and a change log are on the Methods page.
Limits to keep in mind
- Numbers can change slightly after publication as late records arrive or the source data is corrected.
- Matching authors to institutions and countries is automatic and can occasionally be wrong; some papers have no affiliation at all.
- Papers known only by their month or year are dated the 1st, so the first day of a month can look unusually large.
- Counting papers says nothing about their quality. Use these numbers to see where research happens, not to judge individual work.
Use and cite the data
You are welcome to use ResearchBoard's numbers and charts. Please credit ResearchBoard (researchboard.net), data from OpenAlex and PubMed. Daily totals and country data can be downloaded as CSV from the homepage. OpenAlex data is released under CC0.
Contact and follow
Questions, corrections, ideas or data requests are welcome. Use the email and social links below — we read everything.