Disciplinary and institutional shifts: decomposing deviations in the country-level proportions of conference papers in Scopus

This study decomposes country-specific deviations in the share of Conference Papers (CPs) in national research output from the global average into two components: disciplinary and institutional shifts. This approach helps explain the high proportion of CPs in certain countries, where the disciplinary structure of national science justifies such deviations. We propose that the main drivers of institutional shifts include national science policy, particularly performance assessment systems; a high proportion of early-career researchers due to rapid expansion of the research sector; and the prevalence of home conferences, influenced by favorable geographical locations or political preferences. We observed an abnormally low institutional shift in Iran, which has long been under international sanctions, and an extremely high shift in Indonesia, where the rapid development of the scientific sector leads to a high proportion of first-time authors and relaxed scientific ethics requirements. The impact of excessive publication pressure is also evident in post-Soviet countries undergoing transformations in their scientific systems.