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> Western writing has a very small character set

If you include all of the Latin-script characters, Cyrillic, Greek, accent symbols and ligatures, you'd have over 300 characters, and that is a very conservative estimate

> Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press

This is vastly overstated. This was a widely popularized idea in the west but has largely been debunked by more recent scholarship that is less interested in demonstrating the superiority of the west.

Do you have links to relevant research?

Tom Mullaney at Stanford has a good book on chinese typewriters (this narrative is usually presented against both printing presses and typewriters) and is a good entrance into the intersection of chinese script and technology.

History research is typically published in books rather than papers, so it isn't content I can link to directly.

this is why Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing are upstream of so much.