Global Research

Reading the whole map

Where research from every region is published, whether you can reach it, and how we weigh it. One standard for every source.

Most of us learned science through journals, textbooks and famous names from the United States and Europe. That picture is out of date. China now leads the Nature Index in the physical sciences, Latin America publishes most of its research free to read, and instruments in South Africa, Chile, Jordan and Uzbekistan are doing physics the rest of the world depends on.

The divide that matters is not West and East. Japan and Korea publish through the same journals and databases as America and Europe. The divide is between research that turns up in an English-language search and research that does not. This page is a map of the second kind: where it is published, whether you can reach it, and how to read it.

Our own record first. We audited the book’s references in October 2026. Of 368 cited works, 96.5 percent are published in North America or Western Europe, and none is in a language other than English, German or Latin. What we found and what we are changing is in the blog article Reading the Whole Map.

One standard

How we weigh research, wherever it comes from

  1. Is it reviewed, or clearly a preprint? Both can be cited. Neither should be passed off as the other.
  2. Are the data and methods available? A result nobody can check is a claim.
  3. Has anyone independent reproduced it? One laboratory is a start. Two, on different equipment, is the beginning of knowledge.
  4. Has it been retracted or corrected? Check the Retraction Watch database before citing anything, from anywhere.
  5. No credit for prestige, no deduction for geography. A famous journal is not evidence, and an unfamiliar one is not a warning sign.

The standard cuts both ways. Research is not better for having been overlooked. One analysis of 46,000 retractions found China-affiliated institutions on more than half of them across ten large publishers, against about 16.5 percent of those publishers’ output, much of it traced to paper mills that sell fabricated studies. That is a reason to check every paper, not to distrust a country. (Chemistry World, reporting a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed.)

Region by region

Where the research is, and whether you can reach it

Open anyone can read it   Library through a subscribing library   Limited restricted by country or institution

China

Now the largest contributor to high-quality research in the physical sciences, chemistry and the earth sciences. Its JUNO neutrino observatory, 700 metres under Jiangmen, began taking data in August 2025, ahead of Japan’s Hyper-Kamiokande and the US DUNE beam. Its first result, in Nature in June 2026, measured two oscillation parameters 1.6 times more precisely than every earlier experiment combined (IHEP).

  • arXiv Open Many Chinese physics papers appear here in English first. The easiest route.
  • ChinaXiv Open The Chinese Academy of Sciences preprint server, in Chinese and English.
  • CNKI overseas LibraryLimited The main database of Chinese journals, theses and proceedings. Since April 2023 some databases have been suspended for some institutions outside mainland China, mostly theses and proceedings; many university libraries abroad still have access.

Africa

Much African research appears in African journals that the large Western databases barely index. South Africa’s MeerKAT, 64 dishes in the Karoo, is a precursor of the Square Kilometre Array and will become part of it (SKAO). The HERA array, cited in our book, sits beside it.

Latin America

Often held up as the model for open science. Its regional platforms are scholar-led, and most of their journals charge neither readers nor authors. One study of SciELO and Redalyc covered 1,720 journals from 15 countries and 908,982 documents (Dados, 2024). The region hosts ALMA in Chile, the Pierre Auger cosmic-ray observatory in Argentina, and the Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile, the instrument that will decide our test COSMIC-007.

  • SciELO Open Journals from Latin America, Spain, Portugal and South Africa.
  • Redalyc Open Non-profit journals, free to read and to publish in.
  • Latindex Open A directory and quality catalogue of the region’s journals.

The Middle East

SESAME, a synchrotron light source in Jordan modeled on CERN, is run by Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey: governments that rarely cooperate on anything share one machine. Since 2019 its electricity has come from its own solar plant (Physics World).

  • SESAME Open The facility and its publications.
  • DergiPark Open Hosts Türkiye’s peer-reviewed journals. It is a platform, not an index: TR Dizin is the national index.
  • SID Open Iran’s Scientific Information Database, in Persian and English.

Central Asia

An old tradition rebuilding. Ulugh Beg’s observatory in Samarkand produced, around 1437, a catalogue of about a thousand stars that was not bettered until the sixteenth century (MacTutor). Today the Maidanak Observatory in Uzbekistan has some of the steadiest skies measured anywhere, a median seeing of 0.69 arcseconds (JATIS, 2022), and the Tien Shan station at 3,340 metres near Almaty has studied cosmic rays since the late 1950s.

  • Much of the region’s research is published in Russian. Start with CyberLeninka, below, and read with a translation tool.

Russian-language research

Harder to follow since 2022. CERN suspended the observer status of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and stopped issuing new passes to Russian institutions, though the CERN–JINR agreement itself continued (Physics Today). A large share of the literature is still open.

  • CyberLeninka Open A Russian scientific library run on open-access principles, mostly under Creative Commons licences.

The Baltic states

Formally part of Europe, and still overlooked. Lithuania’s laser industry, grown out of Vilnius University, supplies more than half of the world’s ultrashort-pulse scientific lasers by the government’s own figure, including systems built by Light Conversion and Ekspla for Europe’s Extreme Light Infrastructure (Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Many physicists use these instruments daily without knowing where they come from.

South and Southeast Asia

India produces a large share of the world’s research, and its doctoral theses are free to read. Thailand runs a synchrotron in Nakhon Ratchasima and the Thai National Observatory on Doi Inthanon. Indonesia indexes its own journals.

  • Shodhganga Open India’s national repository of doctoral theses.
  • ThaiJO Open Thailand’s central journal database, run by the Thai-Journal Citation Index Centre.
  • Garuda Open Indonesia’s national index of articles and proceedings. It is for finding papers, not for judging them: journal quality ranks are published through SINTA.

Everywhere at once

Tools that cover all of the above better than the usual defaults. Google Scholar and Web of Science under-index regional journals.

  • OpenAlex Open A free index of the world’s research with much broader coverage, including author countries.
  • DOAJ Open The Directory of Open Access Journals, screened for basic standards.
  • Retraction Watch database Open Check before you cite.

Before the journals

The same mathematics, found again and again

The skew is older than any database. Much of the mathematics physics runs on was worked out more than once, in places a Western textbook rarely names.

c. 1800–1600 BCEBabylon

The tablet YBC 7289 gives √2 in base 60 to about four parts in ten million.

c. 1850–1550 BCEEgypt

The Rhind papyrus, copied around 1550 BCE from an older text, works with π ≈ 3.16 and multiplies by doubling, which is binary arithmetic.

c. 250 BCEGreece

Archimedes bounds π between 223/71 and 22/7 with polygons.

3rd–5th centuryChina

Liu Hui and Zu Chongzhi carry the polygon method to seven decimal places; Zu gives 355/113.

c. 700–1150India

Virahanka, Gopala and Hemachandra describe the sequence Europe later named for Fibonacci.

9th centuryPersia and Baghdad

al-Khwarizmi writes the books that give us “algebra” and, from his name, “algorithm”.

c. 1000Cairo

Ibn al-Haytham builds his Book of Optics on controlled experiment.

c. 1400Kerala

Madhava finds an infinite series for π, nearly three centuries before Europe.

1424Samarkand

al-Kashi computes π to sixteen decimal places; unbeaten for nearly two centuries.

Living traditionEthiopia and Eritrea

Halving-and-doubling multiplication is still taught, and the church calendar is computed by Bahre Hasab, kept in Ge’ez manuscripts.

Sources and the fuller story are in Reading the Whole Map; the arithmetic is worked through in the appendix supplement. A list of firsts is its own distortion, and these traditions borrowed from one another. The point is that the same results kept being found, by different people, by different routes.

If you can reach it

You may be able to open a door we can’t

Plenty of researchers live outside their home country or travel for work, and a library card from one country opens databases another country cannot reach. If you have lawful access to something on this page that we have marked limited, through a university abroad, a home institution, or because you live in the region, we would like to hear from you.

What helps: telling us a database is reachable from where you are, checking whether a paper exists, or reading one and telling us what it says. What we will never ask: a shared login, a downloaded copy you are not licensed to pass on, or anything that breaks a licence or a law. Contributions are credited by name, or not, as you prefer.

Tell us what you can reach

Reading in other languages

Machine translation is good enough to follow an argument

A caution about the tools, including ours. AI assistants learned mostly from English-language sources. The first draft of this page came from one, which said so itself, and every fact on it was checked against a source before it went up. Treat any AI summary of a region’s research as a starting point.

What is missing?

This page will always be incomplete. If you know a database, an instrument or a body of work that belongs here, or something on it is out of date, tell us. Corrections are welcome on the same terms.

Checked 10 October 2026.