The Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, has released a new report according to which, a new group of countries, lead by China and followed by others including Brazil and India, are emerging as major scientific powers to rival the traditional 'scientific superpowers' of the US, Western Europe and Japan.
The report also identified some rapidly emerging scientific nations not traditionally associated with a strong science base, including Iran, Tunisia and Turkey. It emphasised the growing importance of international collaboration in the conduct and impact of global science and its ability to solve global challenges such as energy security, climate change and biodiversity loss.
The report, Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global scientific collaboration in the 21st century, analysed a wide variety of data, including trends in the number of scientific publications produced by all countries. It found that China's growing share in the total number of articles published globally is now second only to the long-time scientific world leader, the US.
The publication data analysed by the report showed changes in the share of the world's authorship of research papers between the periods 1993-2003 and 2004-20082. The report notes that the US' share of global authorship has fallen from 26 percent to 21 percent. China has risen from sixth to second place, with its share of authorship rising from 4.4 percent to 10.2 percent. The UK remains stable in the rankings at third place, although its share of authorship has fallen slightly from 7.1 percent to 6.5 percent.
The Royal Society report also analysed citation data (records of the levels at which researchers are citing each others' work in their research). Citations are often used as a means of evaluating the quality of publications, as recognition by an author's peers indicates that the scientific community values the work that has been published. In both time periods, the US leads the ranking, with the UK in second place. However, both have a reduced share of global citations in 2004-2008, compared to 1999-2003. The rise of China is also shown in the data, although the rise does not mirror the rapidity of growth seen in the nation's investment or publication output.
The report found that science is becoming increasingly global, with research undertaken in more and more places and to a greater extent than ever before. In addition to the meteoric rise of China and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and India, the report also identified a number of other rapidly emerging scientific nations. These include Turkey, Iran, Tunisia, Singapore and Qatar.
The report investigated global collaboration, finding that today over 35 percent of articles published in international journals are internationally collaborative, up from 25 percent just fifteen years ago. International collaboration is growing for a variety of reasons including, most importantly, a desire to work with the best people (who may be based in increasingly divergent locations) and the growing need to collaborate on global issues, as well as developments in communication technologies and cheaper travel. Beyond the intuitive benefits of international collaboration, the report illustrated a clear correlation between the number of citations per article and the number of collaborating countries (up to a tipping point of ten countries), illustrating the value of engaging in international collaboration in terms of increasing the impact of research.
Finally, the report considered the role of international scientific collaboration in addressing some of the most pressing global challenges of our time, concentrating on the IPCC, CGIAR, the Gates Foundation, ITER and efforts to deploy carbon capture and storage technology. It looked at the strengths and shortcomings of these models to provide lessons for how international scientific collaboration might be better deployed in future.
Publication and citation data for the report was produced by and analysed in collaboration with scientific publisher Elsevier using Scopus citation and abstract data of global peer-reviewed literature.
The full report is available online at http://royalsociety.org/policy/reports/knowledge-networks-nations.
Search for more Industry study reports
To access our daily STM news feed through your iPhone, iPad, or other smartphones, please visit www.myscoope.com for a mobile friendly reading experience.
