The notion of science as a stratified system is clearly manifested in the markedly uneven distribution of productivity, rewards, resources, and recognition. Although previous studies have shown that institutional environments for conducting research differ significantly between national science systems, disciplines, and subfields, it remains to be shown whether any systematic variations and patterns in inequalities exist among researchers in different national and domain specific settings. This study investigates the positioning of citation elites as opposed to ‘ordinary’ researchers by way of examining three dimensions of concentration (accumulation of publications and citations, specialisation, and institutional concentration) in biology, economics and physics in Denmark and the UK. Across all three dimensions, we put Richard Whitley’s bipartite theory to the test, suggesting a nexus between the intellectual structure of a discipline and the configuration of its elite. The study draws on a dataset of researchers who published most of their publications in either physics, biology, or economics over the 1980–2018 period and with at least one publication in 2017–2018 while affiliated to either a British or a Danish university. We find higher degrees of concentration in the UK compared to Denmark, and that physics and biology respectively display the greatest and lowest degree of concentration. Similar patterns in disciplinary differences are observed in both countries, suggesting that concentration patterns are largely rooted in disciplinary cultures and merely amplified by the national context.

科学作为一个分层系统的概念清楚地体现在生产力、回报、资源和认可的明显不均匀分配上。尽管先前的研究表明，国家科学系统、学科和子领域之间进行研究的制度环境存在显着差异，但不同国家和特定领域的研究人员之间是否存在系统性差异和不平等模式仍有待证明。本研究通过考察丹麦和英国生物学、经济学和物理学的三个维度（出版物和引用的积累、专业化和机构集中度），调查了引文精英相对于“普通”研究人员的定位。在所有三个维度上，我们对理查德·惠特利的二分理论进行了检验，表明一门学科的知识结构与其精英结构之间存在联系。该研究利用了研究人员的数据集，这些研究人员在 1980 年至 2018 年期间发表了大部分物理学、生物学或经济学出版物，并且在 2017 年至 2018 年期间至少发表了一篇出版物，且隶属于英国或丹麦大学。我们发现与丹麦相比，英国的集中度更高，并且物理和生物学分别表现出最大和最低的集中度。两国在学科差异上都观察到了类似的模式，这表明集中模式在很大程度上植根于学科文化，并且仅仅被国家背景放大。