Does a country’s scientific ‘productivity’ depend critically on the number of country journals indexed?

In this paper, we examine the question whether it is meaningful to talk about the scientific productivity of nations based on indexes like the Science Citation Index or Scopus, when the journal set covered by them keeps changing with time. We hypothesize from the illustrative case of India’s declining productivity in the 1980s which correlated with a fall in its journals indexed, that an apparent increase/decrease in productivity for any country, based on observed change in its share of papers could, in fact, be an effect resulting from the inclusion of more/less journals from the country. To verify our hypothesis we have used SCIMAGO data. We found that for a set of 90 countries, the share of journals regressed on the share of papers gave a linear relationship that explained 80% of the variance. However, we also show that in the case of China’s unusual rise in world scientific productivity (to second rank crossing several other countries), there is yet another factor that needs to be taken into account. We define a new indicator—the JOURNAL PACKING DENSITY (JPD) or average number of papers in journals from a given country. We show that the packing density of Chinese journals has steadily increased over the last few years. Currently, Chinese journals have the highest ‘packing density’ in the world, almost twice the world average which is about 100 papers per journal per annum. The deviation of the JPD from the world average is another indicator which will affect so called ‘national productivities’ in addition to the number of national journals indexed. We conclude that in the context of a five fold increase in the number of journals indexed over 20 years, the simplistic notion of ‘scientific productivity’ as equivalent to papers indexed needs to be re-examined.