One of my colleagues was telling me the other day that we at the journal have a bias in favor of the USA. She was specifically making this comment with regard to our reviewer pool, which is indeed dominated by US-based scientists. But then again, there are many more scientists here than in any other country in the world.

In terms of authors, though, there doesn’t seem to be such bias in favor of the US or against any country in particular. Have a look at this graph, which shows the ratio of published to submitted papers as a function of country.

Each color represents a year — from 2007 to 2004, top to bottom. Note that this plot includes papers submitted not only to Nat Med, but it’s pooled data from NMed, NNeuro, NGenet, NSMB, NCellBio, NImmunol and NBT. I didn’t plot the actual number of submitted papers because, of course, we get our largest number of submissions from the US. But this graph clearly shows that we don’t favor the US over, say, Italy or Spain. The graph also shows that countries that have invested heavily in science over the past few years, like Australia, show a steady increase in their ratio of successes over failures. Sure, countries like China and India still have some catching up to do, but they’ll get there, trust me.

LatAm stands for Latin America. South Pacific includes Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Scandinavia includes Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.