ONE MEASURE OF A NATION'S SCIENTIFIC STRENGTH is the number of papers it generates and the citations those papers receive. For the period 1992-96, these were the top producers of papers in a select set of journals: US (1.3 million), UK (300,000), Japan (281,000), and Germany (259,000). Ranked according to citations per paper, the order becomes Switzerland (5.66), US (5.03), Netherlands (4.46), Sweden (4.38), and UK (4.19). The EU nations lumped together and the US each have a 36% share of total citations. The general trend these past 15 years has been for the US citation rate to remain high but for its citation share to give ground to the EU and to Asian/Pacific nations. (ISI ScienceWatch, May/June; also Nature, 5 June 1997.)