15.7 Feature King new new MH

The ability to judge a nation’s scientific standing is vital for the governments, businesses and trusts that must decide scientific priorities and funding. In this paper I analyse the output and outcomes from research investment over the past decade, to measure the quality of research on national scales and to set it in an international context. There are many ways to evaluate the quality of scientific research, but few have proved satisfactory. My analysis updates and extends the groundbreaking work by May, which covered 1981–94, and draws on a study of 1993–2002 commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Technology (OST). Although the OST study’s admittedly parochial objective is to evaluate the United Kingdom’s performance in science and engineering research, this paper should be of more widespread interest as it provides metrics for judging achievement, and analyses of the output and outcomes of other countries. To measure the quantity and quality of science in different nations, I have analysed the numbers of published research papers and reviews,and their citations.All data were provided by Thomson ISI,previously known as the Institute for Scientific Information, which indexes more than 8,000 journals in 36 languages, representing most significant material in science and engineering. One potential problem with this type of bibliometric analysis is that individual papers can skew the results. For instance, a paper may be highly cited because it has been discredited, or because its authors over-cite their own work. However, the large number of papers in this study should smooth out such distortions. The heads of large research institutions may also be authors on papers to which their contribution was largely indirect. However, my analysis considers only authors’country of origin, that is where they are working, rather than individual names. Finally, citation analyses must not be used to compare different disciplines. For example, papers in medical research get many more citations than those in mathematics.An aggregate of citations across disciplines will therefore lead to high-citation disciplines swamping the low, an issue I will consider later. I made comparisons across 31 countries (the comparator group) including the G8 group (italicized) and the 15 countries of the European Union before the 2004 accession (EU15). The countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. This group accounted for more than 98% of the world’s highly cited papers, defined by Thomson ISI as the most cited 1% by field and year of publication.The world’s remaining 162 countries contributed less than 2% in total.