International alignment and scientific regard as macro-indicators for international comparisons of publications

Many international comparisons of the publication performance at themacro level are based on direct counts of citation frequencies in the ScienceCitation Index. However, these comparisons may reveal a significant negativelanguage bias for non-English-speaking countries, or other selection biases,which can be illustrated by the relation between research budgets of scientificinstitutions and SCI publications. Against this background, a two-dimensionalrepresentation, specifying for the international alignment of the nationalpublications and the journal-standardized citation impact, proves to be amore appropriate indicator base to assess the citation performance of countriessuch as Germany. In the light of a ten countries' benchmark, time seriesof these indicators for the nineties show a considerable impact of the Germanunification with a recent trend towards an adaptation of publication behaviourin East Germany towards the Western patterns. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.