## 3 Results and Discussion
### Country of Publication Analysis  
The scope we refer to when mentioning \"the most productive/collaborative country\", \"the scientific impact and relevance of countries' scientific contribution\" et similia, is about geosynthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as papers considered in this study and explained in both the Introduction and Methods sections. The most productive countries in the world are reported in Figure 2, where the darker is the blue, the higher is the country's scientific production. The results show that China, U.S.A., India, Australia and Brazil are the top five scientific contributors in terms of publication (see also Table 3 for a complete list of countries' contribution worldwide). Country Scientific Production  
Figure 1: Annual scientific production. Figure 2: Countries’ scientific production on geosynthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study. The most productive countries have the darkest blue, the least productive have the lightest blue, while grey is for non-productive countries. However, the number of publications is not the sole indicator to be analyzed, as the scientific impact and relevance of countries' scientific contribution should be evaluated by considering also the citations. Hence, Table 4 and Figure 3 report the results of citations of countries' publications worldwide. USA, Portugal, Australia, Japan and China are the top five countries in this list, showing that the most productive countries and the most cited countries show partly different results. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Country**} & **Total** & **Average Article** \\  & **Citations** & **Citations** \\ \hline USA & 719 & 17.98 \\ Portugal & 282 & 35.25 \\ Australia & 194 & 14.92 \\ Japan & 146 & 29.20 \\ India & 106 & 6.62 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 4: Citations of countries’ scientific production on geosynthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c} \hline \hline \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Country**} & **Publications** \\ \hline China & 171 \\ USA & 118 \\ India & 47 \\ Australia & 36 \\ Brazil & 36 \\ UK & 25 \\ Japan & 24 \\ Portugal & 23 \\ Poland & 21 \\ Italy & 20 \\ Malaysia & 10 \\ Canada & 9 \\ Thailand & 7 \\ Iran & 6 \\ Algeria & 5 \\ Pakistan & 5 \\ Slovenia & 5 \\ Turkey & 5 \\ Croatia & 4 \\ France & 4 \\ Spain & 4 \\ Czech Republic & 3 \\ South Korea & 3 \\ Egypt & 2 \\ Lithuania & 2 \\ Slovakia & 2 \\ Afghanistan & 1 \\ Bangladesh & 1 \\ Fiji & 1 \\ Indonesia & 1 \\ Iraq & 1 \\ Netherlands & 1 \\ New Zealand & 1 \\ Nigeria & 1 \\ Saudi Arabia & 1 \\ Singapore & 1 \\ South Africa & 1 \\ Sudan & 1 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Countries’ scientific production on geosynthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study. Finally, as for global scientific collaborations, the main cross-country relationships and knowledge exchange flows involve the following couples: China-USA, China-Australia, France-United Kingdom, India-USA, Portugal-Australia ad USA Australia (see Tables 5 and 6). However, Figures 4 and 5 show that the global collaboration map is highly fragmented.