The geographical diversity of the scientific elite is decreasing, even as the overall scientific workforce is becoming more diverse

The expansion of research systems in low- and middle-income countries has shifted science from a Euro-American duopoly to a more diverse geographical structure. Using a global dataset of 40 million authors, we investigate whether this shift has made it easier or more difficult for newcomers from Global South regions to rise to prominence in their fields. We tracked yearly cohorts of authors who began their publication careers between 2000 and 2014, finding that despite more scientists from the Global South entering science over time, the South-North gap in the likelihood of joining the “citation elite” – the top 5% of most cited authors per cohort – has increased by approximately 23%. We find notable variations by region, with Southern Asia and South-Eastern Asia outperforming Eastern Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of regional shares in the citation elite, and again according to discipline, with larger and growing North-South gaps in citation elite membership in the life sciences, and smaller and shrinking gaps in some engineering-related subfields. Using decomposition approaches, we attribute most of the widening North-South gap in citation elite membership to diverging trends in attrition rates, publication outputs and journal selection. These findings, robust across various evaluation methods, performance metrics, and elite status thresholds, suggest that while the scientific workforce has diversified globally, inequalities persist, thereby underscoring the enduring dominance of wealthier nations in the production and distribution of scientific knowledge.