Abstract

The present paper focused on the comparison between scientific productivity of France, Germany, Italy and Spain, in the psychological areas defined by the Web of Science Research Areas schema. We referred to a previous work published in 2004 in Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, in which a similar comparison had been carried out taking into consideration the years 1974-2002. Those previous results, obtained by applying a different procedure, showed a clear-cut superiority of Germany, in comparison with the other three countries, in 2002, in almost all the scientific journals taken into consideration. In the present study, we explored the scientific productivity of the same countries in the last twenty years, using Clarivate InCites, that is a research analytics and quantitative assessment tool based on Web of Science (WoS) indexes. The current results seem to confirm the increase in the percentages of publications of the four European countries in the psychological areas of WoS. In particular, although the superiority of Germany in terms of overall percentages was confirmed, we found that, in some areas, such as Multidisciplinary, Clinical e Psychoanalysis, Spain and Italy reached results comparable to those of Germany.