Home country bias in academic publishing: A case study of the New England Journal of Medicine.

This study examined home country bias in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Bibliographic information of publications in the NEJM from 2000 to 2019 was collected as data. Bibliometric analyses were performed to investigate the number of papers with one or more US‐based authors in the NEJM and compare this to other journals. Citation counts of US‐based and non‐US papers were calculated and compared. The results show that US‐based papers account for 65.44% of the NEJM papers, and the US share of the NEJM papers has remained stable in the examined years whereas in other journals the percentage decreased. More importantly, US‐based papers in the NEJM display significantly lower research impact compared with non‐US papers. The results suggest that US‐based papers are favoured by the NEJM and a home country bias may exist in the publication process of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]