This study is intended to find an answer for the question on which national
"shoulders" the worldwide top-level research stands. Traditionally, national
scientific standings are evaluated in terms of the number of citations to their
papers. We raise a different question: instead of analyzing the citations to
the countries' articles (the forward view), we examine referenced publications
from specific countries cited in the most elite publications (the
backward-citing-view). "Elite publications" are operationalized as the top-1%
most-highly cited articles. Using the articles published during the years 2004
to 2013, we examine the research referenced in these works. Our results confirm
the well-known fact that China has emerged to become a major player in science.
However, China still belongs to the low contributors when countries are ranked
as contributors to the cited references in top-1% articles. Using this
perspective, the results do not point to a decreasing trend for the USA; in
fact, the USA exceeds expectations (compared to its publication share) in terms
of contributions to cited references in the top-1% articles. Switzerland,
Sweden, and the Netherlands also are shown at the top of the list. However, the
results for Germany are lower than statistically expected
