The authors did not mention the paper of Wagner & Jonkers https://www.nature.com/news/open-countries-have-strong-science-1.22754 that shows Switzerland and Singapore have an open research environment benefiting from high foreign contributions. Also they did not cite a recent article by Van den Besselaar & Sandström entitled "Funding, evaluation, and the performance of national research systems" published in the Journal of Informetrics that ranks countries according to their efficiency in turning funding into highly cited papers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157717302882 Furthermore, i think that one of the "shortcomings" of your article is the fact forgot to look at the case of Iceland and has instead put too much faith on Singapore performance. Singapore may be a high scientific performance country, however, has a high inequality problem. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/can-education-fix-growing-inequality-in-singapore-10308796 Meaning that if they fail to fix it sooner or later their scientific performance will not save that country from serious internal problems. That is also why I do not share your view on China research capacity because no matter how efficient they become one of these days they will have to face a serious internal problem concerning the fact that the nature of their political system does not allow full potential development by its citizens. Concerning the study of Rodriguez-Navarro & Brito a similar conclusion could have been found in a much more simpler and faster way by searching the Web of Science for Top 0.1% papers which confirms Germany and other European countries are much less capable of turning their wealth into influential papers. Also if one adjust the list below taking into account GDP/capita Germany goes directly to the last position. Iceland and Denmark on the other side that have a GDP/capita much higher than Germany rank in the first two positions in the GDP related ranking. What do they do in Iceland that Germany can´t ? A deeper look into the Iceland scientific production in the last 5 years show a strong connections to Karolinska Institut, Harvard University, Uppsala University as well as to Cambridge and Oxford Universities, those connections represent around 20% of all Iceland referenced outputs in the last 5 years.

Ratio (Hottest Papers (Top 0.1%) in the last 5 years/ million people) 1-Iceland..............53.8 2-Luxembourg…..39.7 3-Switzerland.…..27.6 4-Denmark……....25.1 5-Sweden……..…18.4 6-Netherlands…..17.5 7-Norway……..….16.9 8-Belgium…….….15.3 9-Australia…….…14.8 10-Finland………...14.2 11-Austria………....12.9 12-New Zealand..11.9 13-Canada………….9.6 14-Slovenia.........8.6 15-Cyprus……….….8.5 16-Spain…………….5.9 17-Portugal…….……5.8 18-Germany………...5.8 19-Hungary………….5.5 20-Greece……….….5.0 21-France……….…..5.0 22-Italy…………….…4.8 23-Czech Rep......…4.8 24-Lithuania………...3.1 25-Latvia..............3.0 26-Croatia.............2.6 27-Poland……….…..2.6 28-Romenia..........1.9