For the past few years, the National Science Foundation has been looking at American science and engineering publications and how they're trending in comparison with publications from other nations. The results of their analysis are presented here.
From the report page:
The study was prompted by evidence that the numbers of U.S. S&E articles, after increasing for decades, had leveled off in the early 1990s while funding and the number of researchers continued to increase.
The study comes back with no clear answer about why American publications are making up a smaller slice of publications overall, but there are some highlights:
- The study used the Thomson Scientific ISI Web of Knowledge cited publication database, which has traditionally been heavily biased toward American publications. As foreign scientists become better trained and behave "more like scientists from the United States" they're publishing more often in American journals.
- Science and engineering funding has spiked in some other nations, such as China - this correlates with their substantially increased chunk of the publications, however...
- ...American publications are still cited far more often than foreign publications. For example, China was fifth in 2005 in terms of number of publications, but was still 124th for cited publications in the 1994-2004 period. European science and engineering articles are also cited far less often than American articles. The thought here is that even if American publications are a smaller slice of the overall pie, they're still the only high-quality slice.
So what does this mean? It's hard to say. It might mean one of these:
- The rest of the world is catching up to us scientifically
- America's growth in R&D investment is slower than in other countries
- American research is more often cutting-edge than research in other countries, and as such is increasingly expensive over time - more so than research in other countries
At the end of the day, the official panel conclusion is a big, if thoughtful, shrug. There isn't enough information to say what the exact implications of this flattening off are, both in terms of the quality of American research and in terms of what the country should do in the future. I'm inclined to think that it's not a fundamental problem. At some point, developing nations become developed nations, and the publication space simply won't expand as quickly as the expansion in publications.