You seem to be saying: Countries that spend more money on publishing papers to signal their expertise publish more papers. Therefore, they are not signalling.
This sounds like a fully-general counterargument: if a country is publishing few papers and those papers aren’t getting cited or hailed, then obviously they have no major scientific expertise; but if they are publishing scads of highly cited papers, then they’re merely spending lots of money on signaling and so have no major scientific expertise.
As I said, there being zero correlation between papers & citations and genuine scientific productivity seems unlikely to me and requires actual evidence and not hand^Wsignal-waving suggestions.
You seem to be saying: Countries that spend more money on publishing papers to signal their expertise publish more papers. Therefore, they are not signalling.
This sounds like a fully-general counterargument: if a country is publishing few papers and those papers aren’t getting cited or hailed, then obviously they have no major scientific expertise; but if they are publishing scads of highly cited papers, then they’re merely spending lots of money on signaling and so have no major scientific expertise.
As I said, there being zero correlation between papers & citations and genuine scientific productivity seems unlikely to me and requires actual evidence and not hand^Wsignal-waving suggestions.