The mediating impact of citation scope: Evidence from China's ESI publications

•We develop two novel measures of citation scope using geography and research field as metrics and explore their mediating effects on scholarly impact.•We retrieve two different time periods of accrued citations to explore the temporary effects of influencing factors for highly cited research.•Our finding sheds some light on the mechanism by which internationally collaborative research and interdisciplinary studies positively affect research visibility. The highly skewed nature of research influence has been widely acknowledged. Among extant studies examining contributing factors, most focus on the hard sciences in developed economies with very few examining the social sciences in emerging powers. The impact of citation scope is likewise left largely underexplored. In this paper, we develop two novel measures of citation scope using geography and research field as metrics and explore their role in boosting academic impact. Our results support geography as a citation scope serving an important pathway through which international collaboration affects academic impact. Such effect increases in prominence in later years. We do not find evidence indicating the mediating effect of research field citation scope on scholarly recognition.