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U.S. Science and Engineering Research Flattens
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "The National Science Foundation is reporting that the number of published U.S. science and engineering articles plateaued in the 1990s, despite continued increases in funding and personnel for research and development. This came after two decades of continued growth. Since then, flattening has occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions. In contrast, Asian and EU research had significant increases in this period. They do point to one positive for the US, however: article quality. According to one of the researchers, 'the more often an article is cited by other publications, the higher quality it's believed to have. While citation is not a perfect indicator, U.S. publications are more highly cited than those from other countries.'"
Almost half of researchers working in US establishments are foreign. We just don't have the homegrown talent any more.
Hasn't this bit of news been floating around for months, if not years now ? Did they just find new indications ? Or are they trying to make it sink in with even the most fact-resistant people ?
This is probably a result of the disaster that was (and is) our education policy stemming from the 70s / early 80s. We are now finding generations of Americans that are ridiculously "dumbed down". If we carry on like this we'll end up like the world of Harrison Bergeron.
In the US, research has first of all be "pleasant" to whoever funds it. Yes, that's true for most countries, but nowhere else you'll find as much industrial and political influence into research. Try to do a research on, say, climate change and watch the government go crazy over it should you dare to come up with results that point to us as the reason for an increase in temperature.
Add the religious side and you'll see why Europe currently feels an influx of researchers, not only from "poor" countries where they can't get funding, but also a healthy dose of quite capable people from the US who prefer to ponder what their findings mean, not to ponder what they may write should they not want to be censored. It's Reneaissance all over again, where you can find whatever you want, but if you want to remain in the good standing and be respected as a researcher, you better find what government, industry and especially media want to hear, or you'll soon find yourself being attacked and badmouthed, and your reputation ruined.
Would you want to do research in that kind of climate?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
US failing sighenc? That's umpossible.
rewriting history since 2109
I'd make the guess that language matters more for citation than for acceptance.
Acceptance only evaluates the scientific merits, citation requires the paper to have given the citing person insight.
I'd love to see this compared with british statistics, and possibly french (since the majority of non-english journals i know are french)
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
There's still growth, the article just doesn't state exactly how much - probably ~0.65% annually, from the information given..
Anyways, as the article states, papers aren't always the best indication of actual information output. It's common practice for researchers to "recycle" papers, adding a bit of new information on top of the bulk of previous published work. It's in a researcher's best interest to limit the amount of both papers AND information, as to keep a steady stream of output (and keep their job). Tracking citation count seems more accurate in representing useful information output. It'd be even more accurate if we could somehow track actual implementation and use of the information.
Look at:
nuclear weapons/research: Albert Einstein and many other exiles from Europe
computers: John Von Neumann (Hungarian)
rockets and space: America's space and rocket program was kickstarted by a nucleus of German scientists after the war bought here
That is not to say we don't have our own home grown talent - just that science is an international activity and we have been lucky enough to be able to draw the best and brightest, foreign or domestic, to our country.
Whether it remains so in the long run, I am not certain - it requires an open and free country (something we're losing) and enough wealth, of course, as cutting edge science often requires funds scientists usually don't have themselves and hence the US was a good place to find patronage.
I wonder what it would look like if we also plotted the funding allocated to the NSF alongside the number of papers published.
The NSF has had some serious funding woes since the 90s that very well may be causing this "draught" -- I wouldn't even go as far as to completely blame it on the Bush administration either (although they certainly did contribute).
As far as physics research goes, Clinton's cancellation of the already partially-constructed SSC easily set the entire field of particle physics back by 20 or so years. The LHC, which is being constructed in Europe as its "substitute" isn't even remotely as big or powerful as the SSC was originally planned to be.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I wonder if the higher citation rate of US articles is due to the fact they are written in English and therefore more accessible to a higher percentage of the scientific community? Presumably a lot of a country's scientific publications will be in the language of that country and it would be reasonable to assume that an article published solely in, of example, Russian or German, would be less widely cited outside the Russian or German speaking communities...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Whilst the US indeed produces many a good paper, it should not be forgotten that many of the reviewers for papers hint that inclusion of their papers in the citation list of an article might be beneficial to further the goal of acceptance of the paper. What nationality the reviewers have is something that I do not know, but the distribution might be skewed given that many good journals are published from the US.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
is flattening American brains!
That'd be why!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
number of articles != quality of research performed
"'nuff said"
or just inflation?
Enforce the broken US patent system in the rest of the world ;-)
I just wonder how long it will take until the USA has to pay a lot for foreign patents.
I personally give it 10 years!
The US continues to be attractive because it tends to offer the best facilities (laboratories, datasets, computers, funding) in the world. Plus it hosts some of the best researchers in the world. Taken together this of course attracts *other* very good researchers. This in turn results in articles that have a higher citation index than most. So far so good.
I believe that the US cannot realistically expect to continue to lead the world in basic scientific research. As a matter of fact, it has lost that position already in a number of fields. What I believe it *can* expect to do is to continue to lead the world in applying research and turning up with innovative products.
Why? Because part of it is cultural. People here are always willing to go out and build something for themselves, which is the essence of starting a business, and society as a whole is very much geared towards giving new ideas and new businesses a chance, weed out the failures, cherish the successes, and let those who failed try again. That's important. In e.g. Europe failure in a business venture attracts a heavy stigma. Not so in the US. In the US it's also relatively easy to hire people for a startup, and to fire them the minute things go wrong, or even if revenues are lower than expected. And last but not least ... in the US venture capitalists are thoroughly aware that they must sow ten potatoes to reap one truly outstanding venture, three reasonably ones, and perhaps six poor ones. Unless other countries can copy that, the US is at an advantage.
Now both China and India are busily trying to imitate the US in this respect, and especially China has made a lot of headway. But the US still has the lead. And to be honest ... who would want to go the China and learn Chinese when they can also go the to US and use the English they learned in school? Excepting Chinese of course. Ever tried to find your way in China? The US has a big cultural advantage when it comes to competing as a destination of choice.
The undertone of the article is a bit warning of course. Even if one were somehow able to revitalise the US primary and secondary school system *and* make it attractive for Americans to pursue a career in science and/or engineering instead of business management, law, marketing, the military, etc. etc., it would take about two decades for the results to become visible. Personally I would say that the best bet for the US is continue to do what it has traditionally been good at, which is to focus on first attracting and then absorbing those immigrant researchers and turning their research into products.
This is precisely why the US takes such an agressive stance on "Intellectual Property", and does whatever it can to make every country in the world respect US copyrights. It's of strategic importance.
This is also at the heart of the US immigration policy, which runs approximately as follows: "We want those of you if you are the best or one of the best in your field. Those we will welcome to stay, and offer the chance to join the club and become a citizen. Others will be required to enter as illegal immigrants."
It's a bit parasitic, but it works.
You do know that we speak the same language as y'all in the UK, right? :P The citation thing does sound like a load of bunk to me, unless they check every citation in every article/paper/essay the world in all languages..?
which is totally what she said
We love to cite US research paper because they can be searched electronically, while the others might be required getting down to the microfilms, or worse, papers.
And yes, this is the quality that counts - the quality of storing and indexing research papers.
While citation is not a perfect indicator, U.S. publications are more highly cited than those from other countries.
Who are they actually citing? An American researcher? A Norwegian researcher? A Chinese researcher? Just because the article is published in a U.S. publication doesn't mean the researcher is American...
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
The patent system is poison for research publication. I heard a remarkable comment from the EU Commission (DG Research) who were boasting that they were collecting a great patent portfolio, and only had one problem: the tendency of their researchers to publish articles, thus sabotaging the patent collection process. But, they have a solution, namely to educate researchers to publish less.
The horrid irony of it all is that the only valid basis for the patent system is to encourage people to publish in cases where they would otherwise keep precious designs secret.
There is absolutely no justification for patents in areas where people publish spontaneously. Except, of course, greed, and the lust for money above all.
Time for reform of the global patent system.
My blog
that there is no objective way to measure the quality of research. For this, one would have to know what "quality" means and already there, opinions are highly divergent. But of course the beancounters of the money-giving institutions need some yardstick and so there are and have been different yardsticks in different countries and at different times. Scientists will quickly adapt to any yardstick: if you get money and jobs by publishing a lot, they will publish a lot. If you get it by getting cited, they will get cited. If you get it by not publishing and having lots of patents or company cooperations instead, this is what will happen. None of this will ensure research though, that will advance the state of the art. Most of these regulations and rules imposed by beancounters will simply take the time and energy away from scientists who want to do research.
Ultimately, science, like art, often has to be useless to be good. In many cases however, useless science might eventually and surprisingly turn out to be quite useful indeed, practically. Take number theory: what beancounter of the world would have guessed that this esoteric branch of pure matematics would once become the fundamental force behind e-commerce, authentification and authorization systems and other applications of electronic cryptography?
"U.S. publications are more highly cited than those from other countries". Because they are in English and it's "the language" of science currently? I'm not saying it's main reason, but it may have some meaning. And any day I would like better publications over more publications.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
This assumes that the quality of research in all papers are average. The only indicator of quality being used is citation. But the visible technological impact is derived from application of research rather than quantity or quality of research. For e.g. the country that first creates a quantum computer is going to obsolete lot of the research that is going on in the silicon world. A 1000 papers on current computer hardware might not be worth the one paper that explores application of quantum computing. How do you measure this and determine quality of research. It is highly likely that these 1000 papers have more citations as well. R&D outfits that are developing applications of quantum computing might not really spend more time on writing research papers for publishing.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
In my field (computer architecture) there are a lot of second-rate journals which can easily be cited, and show up in a lot of searches. These have a much higher percentage of foreign articles because they are not the top conferences/publications. The impression I have is that a lot of foreign countries grant tenure based purely on the number of publications, not the quality. I'd much rather have one or two in a top conference than four in second-rate journals.
altruistic ideals (in the main). Young people are very practical when there own self-interest is involved. Students, especially in the USA where, according to Dr Gil Grissom, the degree is worth $1 million and almost costs $1 million, tend to choose course that will provide a cost benefit appropriate to their needs. They need to pass a course and be awarded a degree worth having (in relative terms).
In the past a degree in law was the opportunity to earn high salaries. Now of course there are far too many lawyers and not enough cases to supply them. Science and engineering degrees are not as popular, perhaps because some work involving measurement, assesment and being able to look up a book or a dictionary using all of the letters of the alphabet is a requisite.
Degree courses go through fads, witness the number of marketing graduates in the late 80's early 90's most of whom are not employed with a stone's throw of any marketing activity. Science is presently akin to magic and prospective students are surprised to discover that membership of Slytherin, is not part of the enrolment procedure. Nor are they given a magic wand or a tricorder along with the university calendar. The necessity to provide some evidence of achievement in the form of science papers and test results is a pale shadow to the ease of making an extended exposition on man's obsession with himself in lawyer school. Thank goodness there is no stand alone course concept in Web Design - lecturing staff would be crushed in the stampede as so many students (when asked to express a preference) often suggest that they intend a career in PR (the discipline of mixing a rather tasty Bucks Fizz.) or Web design. When you are paying for your education by working in The Golden Arches or as an exotic dancer, it becomes rather important to you, to choose a career path that you expect to be rewarding, at least in the financial sense if nothing else.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
The education system in the US was watered down starting in the 60's. It became politically incorrect to flunk anyone, so standards were lowered. Just look at the current administration, a product of the 60's. In the US, athletes are idolized whereas those interested in science are labeled GEEKS and outcasts. How much does a good scientist make? How much does a good athlete make? There's the answer.
Unless you speak Danish, y'all don't speak the same language as us in the DK.
I guess my point was that I think, whether or not the language is in your primary language, matters. Then i further speculated that it matters more for Citations than it does for acceptance.
But you're right, measuring the quality of an article by the amount of citations is often useless.
Measuring by what they cite can be even worse.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Honestly, I can't think of a single 'American' invention which wasn't actually an invention by an immigrant who only came to the US because there was more money here.
Can anyone think of a real, world-beating innovation by an American, born here, whose parents were also born here Americans? Not a 'first', like the Wright Brothers (there were a lot of people round the world working on airplanes who could just as easily have been first, so the Wrights did not 'invent' the airplane), but a totally new advance.
In my own field of electronics I'm thinking of people like Faraday or Maxwell. But you could have Wegener in Plate tectonics, or..oh, I don't know. Any ideas?
Even the 50s were better on treating foreign teachers and researchers. Now you get, with a lot of luck, a non-citizen Green Card. You are constantly bullied by random uneducated locals. And, if you are lucky there are many others in your same situation around you, you end up in a virtual ghetto. F*** that. Europe has it's priorities better now. USA lost it. Go build your racist and unfair wall to keep off the real native North Americans from their own land (check the "Mexican War".) Mod me down if it touches your right-wing heart. But that doesn't make truth go away. Read the title.
Measuring citations by how often they are cited is what I was referring to, and while it is possibly a good measure of how good an article is, it doesn't tell you whether that article is any better than one done in another language..
which is totally what she said
It is best explained in Intelligent Design paradigm. We the clergy have been intelligently molding the public opinion against all knowledge in general and science in particular. Let us not forget that we were banished from the Garden of Eden because we tasted the Fruit of Knowledge. We have already convinced 55% of America that Evolution is a hoax. Pretty soon we will have the other 45% too. Then it is party party party time for us. We will tell everyone what they should do and how they should live and we get 10% of their paychecks. And much more than 10% from the sinners, by selling them indulgences!
The pagan, nature worshipping, Linux running, Open Standards promoting, Microsoft bashing, Apple fanboiing slashdotters might think it is a bad thing. But they are the minority. We are the majority. We will use their own Democracy to steal the nation from them! That will teach them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There are many more people in Europe than in America and each country of which has it's own rich R&D culture. Papers that are not part of a Ph.D will probably be translated into English and published if accepted into an important conference, intended to be sold, or otherwise considered very important research. British English is considered the official language of the EU and while EU-wide R&D collaborations will often be performed in English, a huge proportion will go 'under the radar' of 'The National Science Foundation'.
Is that our government's research priorities are changing and so are its policies. There are huge amounts being spent on defense research, even in colleges, that comes with International Traffic in Arms Regulations(ITAR) strings on the money. These sorts of strings are designed to minimize and dilute the body of research in the public sphere (i mean prevent technological weapons from being exported).
The ITAR bit is just the most socially relevant of the new round of restrictions and "chilling effects" being levied on American researchers. There are others, like politics, etc. as already mentioned.
On another note, it is not true that America is the worst offender here. Try doing any research not possible in America in say, an Islamic theocracy, like Iran.
The main point is that article quantity may not be a valid measure of the amount of research occurring.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
The statistic they're citing, number of citations, is the same statistic that underlies page rank. As we've discovered from the industry that has grown up trying to game google search rankings, being well connected by citations is really only a sign that you are well connected.
In a system where your prestige depends on being connected to well connected others, being among the first to be connected has its advantages. Others will want to be connected to you in order to show that they are also connected. It should be noted that after WWII, the US was really alone in the western research world. It's still accruing benefits from that.
I wouldn't be soothed by the citation statistic. At this juncture, it's an historical artifact.
"The only way we won't leave a child behind is if this bus never leaves."
...they'll find another self-serving dubious metric to avoid facing the truth.
"U. S. research articles consistently rated higher than European articles on the Flesch Reading Ease scale."
"U. S. research articles have been shown to be higher in 'eyeball stickiness.' Readers spend more time per page, go back and read each page more often, and 'click through' to generate more reprint requests than European articles."
"The NAS reported that although U. S. research failed to meet all eighteen of its benchmarks, it had made satisfactory progress toward achieving eight of them."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Overall, non-Americans are less geocentric and hence know the American literature better. Being a European computer scientist, I know for a fact that on average, European researchers know the American literature (ACM proceedings and transactions, for example) much better than the Americans know the European literature (as published by, e.g., Springer). Surely there is also a difference in quality, but one can simply not cite what one does not know.
I disagree
I am Dutch, but if I had an important science or tech paper to write, I'd definitely try to get it into one of the international magazines, all of them in English. If I cannot get accepted in them, I might try to go for one of the Dutch language papers (are there any?). By limiting myself to those reading my own language, I pretty much automatically put myself in the lower tier of researchers, unable to compete on the world level.
Over a century ago it used to be French for science (or German if you were a physicist). Right now it's English.
I go to a top 5 engineering school. Even there the emphasis is less and less on the actual science and more on business and so called leadership skills. People are being trained less in hard science and more in corporate ways. If you take an engineering class, from my experience, half the people don't care about being an engineer and want to get their MBA and be a manager and "make money".
Until we get rid of this crap that "The business of America is business" this will not change and we will continue to lose ground on the science front.
Of course, but that doesn't discount that a huge amount of research is done in the EU in languages other than English. There is a vast amount of research written in German and Spanish, the latter of which traditionally has a low level of English literacy. Spain is especially one to consider as it's a powerhouse of R&D right now.
This was discussed earlier on Slashdot as well:1 6/0647235
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/
"US Can't Meet The 'Grand Challenges' of Physics", on the "troubling picture of the state of physics research" in the US
If you're interested in helping the US improve its research capabilities, write to your representatives. If you still have good handwriting, that's preferable. If not, type it and print it. Because so few people spend the effort to do this, it is still a powerful option for a small, motivated body. Funding for the NIH is shrinking. This is one of the top sources for the bulk of research performed: chemistry, biochemistry, biology, medical, even physics and computer science. The NIH funds a major chunk of every research university's programs. Government funding should be re-made a priority in this country. Primary and secondary education needs to be improved. Again, the way to do this is not with more rigorous testing and the denial of funding (No Child Left Behind), but increased funding for basic education. Of course, the image of teachers and education in general needs to be improved as well, but there's less your Representatives can do about that. Finally, immigration reform. The US still attracts top foreign talent, but it is an absolute nightmare even to get permission to study in this country, let alone work or live here. By handing out mostly temporary visas to a limited pool of foreign academics, we're restricting the number of brilliant researchers we allow to stay in this country. Currently many come over for graduate studies, but are denied the ability to remain in the US and become a citizen. This means we fund their scientific schooling in graduate school, and when they become most productive they're booted back out of the country. Wouldn't you prefer they stayed and worked here, raised their children and contributed to society with the education we payed for?
Bell Labs was the greatest R&D facility in the world. Unix, Fiber Optics, Telephones, etc are a few that come to mind. We need to bring back the spirit of innovation just for the sake of innovation. This dedication brought in tons of foreign revenue into our economy. I can walk down to a "foreign" Citigo and see people with "foreign" PSPs and "foreign" Toyotas. I try not to buy any foreign products, but it gets hard sometimes. (That's what she said) Head of the Congressional Science Committee stated that, "When I look at my daughter (Age 2 at the time), I see the first generation of Americans that will have a lower standard of living than their parents. That is not the American Dream" (Not sure on the quote)
is that creationism people with one hand drains science (and thus technology) down the wc, while with the other one uses the cell, browse the internet, watches the TV and drives the car.
Possibly all at the same time.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Why do this?
Because the current system sub-optimizes both the researchers' and the teachers' time. Excellent researchers are busy instructing students rather than working in the lab; excellent teachers are writing grant proposals rather than focusing on the classroom.
Researchers as a group don't want to teach nor is teaching an optimal use of their time. The best teachers are usually not excellent researchers. The two fields are so different that it is uncommon to find an individual excellent in both.
Success rates at NSF and NIH have dipped below 10% in many cases. Uni's want money, money, money. You do the math.
Citing US articles is not a measure of how good they are, it's a measure of who's citing: US researchers and those non-US researchers who want their work to find its way into US journals.
The 'flattening' has been going on for 20 years now, and it's due primarily to enormous cost increases. Many US journals are pricing themselves out of existence because even major university libraries can't afford to keep all of them. Plus, access to electronic versions of articles makes subscribing to the entire journal a waste.
There is an up side -- non-US journals will cover topics that US journals won't. The research is every bit as good, and is productive (leads to further research) and useful (leads to technology). US journals and researchers ignore things like botanical pharmecutics because it seems like 'alternative' medicine, when the truth is most pharmaceuticals started out as plant product derivatives. So more power to the other researchers -- they'll end up with a productive piece of a pie that US researchers turn down, and they'll finally catch up in research scientifically and financially.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Raising the bar how? By stating things that way, you infer that the position of unfettered research is somehow noble, which in fact is a dubious position.
Spin = presenting the discussion in terms favourable to your position, usually employing loaded words.
The gist of the unfettered researcher's argument is "I should be able to take grant money and do whatever I want with it, free of any ethical or moral standards."
The scientists in CS Lewis' Space Trilogy describe the archetype quite succinctly. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a cogent poem on societal progress as well.
"...Whoever said that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always a step in the right direction? When, in this unlighted cave, the next step may well be the downstep into the abyss... We are like disbalanced boulders rolling downhill crushing beneath us many delicate green springing things whose intention it had been to grow."
The unreferenced parts of the discussion include things like the origin of the money. This is important on several levels. The objective of research is to solve problems relevant to society. As a counterpoint, there aren't too many underwater basketweaving research institutes. Is it unfair to the basketweaving research community that their research is not socially relevant and thus is underfunded? Additionally, most research is funded by companies with a profit-rooted goal in mind or by the government. The reflexive argument by the offended taxpayer (who you scoff at) with this in mind is "The government stole this money from me through taxation and uses it to fund work that I find reprehensible." A more loaded argument would take the form of "So if you were to want to conduct low survivability experiments on institutionalized people, I should fund that too?"
The thing you ignore is that we as a society have been steadily improving the quality and consistency of our ethics. No, we're not perfect, but we no longer use federal tax money to pay for the torture of the mentally retarded in the name of science. We did this as recently as the 1960s. This was a deep blow to those espousing unfettered research at the time.
Setting moral and ethical standards is the job of the whole culture. No profession has ever been able to effectively self-regulate. Researchers are no exception. Some of the more recent restrictions on research are reactions (in some cases perhaps overreactions) to real or perceived failure of researchers to adhere to the societal mores.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Actually, this demonstrates a key difference in the educational philosophies of China and many South American countries. In South America, the focus was on the best and the brightest. In China, the focus was on getting everyone the equivalent of a high school education.
Now, obviously there's lots of other factors, but note that China has a huge industrial base now. Basically anyone can work in a factory or business doing ordinary tasks. In South America, the poor continue to be poor and the well educated move to other countries.
I'd like to think there's significant value in teaching nearly everyone to read and write well, basic math skills, and the ability to follow directions. Remember that these immigrant children are going to end up marrying your daughters, working in your office, and taking care of you in your old age. You get a pretty good return on investment spending a few thousand dollars in basic education per kid. Don't let prejudice derail common sense.
The data comes from Thomson Scientific/ISI, and we do exactly that for every paper published in just about every journal in the last 100 years.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
What this article fails to mention is the decrease in personel in Engineering-related jobs. (Which I can, at this time, not find a viable link to, so you'll have to take my word for it. I read about it in (coincidentally enough) an engineering class I took last year.)
Engineering doesn't pay enough anymore. And I'm not sure if anyone else noticed, but the interest in math and science isn't there in American school children anymore. Ask any random kid if they like science or not, and 9/10 will tell you not.
Add this to the growing population in overseas Engineers, and what do you have? That's right, -- an accountability for the dramatic flatline in American engineering articles being published.
There is an underlying assumption that technology is a US comparative advantage. However, this is not necessarily the case. It has been taken as an article of faith, but it is only that. As we all know from H1B/outsourcing issues, labor costs in the US are higher than much of the world. Brains are simply cheaper per neuron overseas. This does not mean that all technology research will go abroad, but much of it will. The 3rd world is nibbling around the edges. Our comparative advantage may lie in marketing and deal-making, not necessarily technology.
Table-ized A.I.
Early in the 1990s the US Government passed something called the balanced budget amendment. And as a consequence the job market for postdoctoral researchers collapsed. When in 1988 I interviewed for 30 positions by myself at a major conference, and when in 1994 at the same major conference there were 20 or so total jobs for all the thousands of researchers.. well, we had to eat, didn't we?
So these days we write web pages and keep servers alive and do what we can to earn a living, because as poorly as scientists are paid they can't take 2-5 years not doing anything to return to jobs when things become sane again.
The US threw away a generation of researchers. That's why, in my opinion, the output plateau'd in the 1990s.
AC
As Lil'Bush said: "Science is not based on facts, if it was, it would not be called science-fiction., but science-faction!"
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I have been doing materials science research on my own dime. One of the interesting phenomena is that virtually all American research and most western European research are tied up in journals that only a university could afford to subscribe to. I cannot pay 20 or a 100 dollars to see an article online which may or may not even be what I need. Some of these journals charge thousands of dollars a year for a subscription. None of the journals are carried by my local university library. It probably would be possible to get many of them via interlibrary loan but it would be very difficult due to the wide variety of articles I need. The upshot is that eastern European, Indian, and some Chinese researchers publish in journals that are freely available online and in English. As a result, I frequently get information from these sources but almost never from Americans. At least for the specialized field of materials science I've been working on, copyright is the single largest impediment to doing research. How is it that studies that were paid for by the government and should be property of the public can be locked up in journals that are too expensive to obtain. Perhaps we need to start a campaign of suing the funding agency for each article under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the article!
Are you trying to say Mexicans are the natives for the North American region?
Uhm... wow. The wall is not going to keep the original and true Native Americans (Indians) out. They're already here.
Insightful, indeed. How soon we forget history. If we ever knew it. Apparently not.
If all those people coming north put their effort into cleaning up their own broken countries they wouldn't need or want to come north. Mexico has a truly *huge* natural resource base and the world's 12th largest economy yet the people are starving. Go figure that somehow this is all the fault of evil Americans.
If scientific publication growth has flattened, is that a problem? No growth is sustainable forever, after all: it will always plateau somewhere, as you hit "carrying capacity".
You could get more publications by increasing the number of scientists in the country, but even that has limits: you can't have more than 100% of the population doing scientific work (and realistically, much less). And by increasing the number of scientists, you will eventually start including more and more people who probably aren't cut out for science and won't contribute any additional quality, or maybe even any additional publications.
So for a plateau to be a problem, you have to argue that the U.S. both can and should be producing many more quality scientific publications than it is now. Is that the case?
While the number of publications might have plateaued, this might be because the number of venues for publications hasn't been increasing. One thing is definitely for sure in the research area (at least computer science) - the grant money is not increasing very fast (or at all) and the number of venues for publications is not increasing very fast (or at all), however the competition for grant money and publications is certainly increasing. With only a select amount of grants being offered, and a select amount of publication venues available, of course the number of publications won't be increasing. Quality on the other hand, hopefully will, due to more rigorous selection of grant recipients and published papers.
US continues to lead Networking and Networked Systems research by a large margin.
Take SIGCOMM for example. It is arguably the top conference in networking. It is the most reputable
among computer networks researchers and it happens to be among the top 4 most cited conferences
in computer science in general ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/impact.html
http://libra.msra.cn/conf_category_24.htm).
Out of the 33 papers in SIGCOMM 2007, there are 29 papers from American research centers
(MIT, UCB, UCSD, Cornell, CMU, SDSC etc ). There are only 4 from Europe (Polytechnico di Torino, TUD, Delft, INRIA).
The truth is that the number of European and Chinese Publications in top Networking and Systems Conferences
has increased substantially (there used to be a time that a top conference would have at most one non-US publication).
This however, by no means can be interpreted as the quality of US research in communication networks degrading.
It simply means that the rest of the world is beginning to realize the benefits of fundamental communication
networks research. Still, Europe and Asia have long way to go.
According to the report, Japan's article output rose at an average annual rate of 3.1 percent, five times faster than the United States.
The European Union, which passed the U.S. several years ago in total numbers of articles published, posted an average annual growth rate of 2.8 percent during the same period, more than four times faster than the United States.
Law of diminishing returns my ass. And this plateu began to occur in the 90s? Would that be the late 90s? Would that be right before the Fundy/faux-Conservative/Anti-Intellectual revolution in politics occurred in the US? Massive sweeping tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% (most importantly corporations) does tend to dampen scientific development; so does cutting the programs that rely on those tax dollars for funding. Unbridled, shameless bedsharing between corporations and educational institutions resulting in patents instead of universally accessible scientific results also tends to suffocate collaboration (i.e. scientific progress).
If anything, the rapid proliferation of computer, network, and storage technologies should have made the 200X years a blockbuster decade for science and technology in the US. But sadly my friends, when you ignore politics...or live in a country ignorant enough to vote extremists into office...you will see very real effects down the road. The only bright side to having that clown in the whitehouse and his cronies in power is that a great deal of money (read massive debt that you and your children will have the responsibility of paying down over decades) went into defense related research and development. Historically, those technologies will eventually migrate back into civilian hands.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
That's what happens to people who expect 2 B told what to think instead of thinking for themselves.
Yah!
The reason for the decline in American science is obvious if you RTFA, in particular the photo at the top: there is an increasing number of hot babes in science. (That's the only way I can understand the relevance of the photo, at least.) The nerds have simply been distracted, rendering them completely useless, and you can't expect the babes to take up 100% of the slack, so that accounts for the drop in numbers. Q.E.D.
To think that the number of articles has anything to do with the quantity? I would think that a scientist that reports on progress in nuclear fusion every two years has more to offer than some that writes an article a week about some less difficult topic.
This is my sig.
I'd make the guess that language matters more for citation than for acceptance.
Acceptance only evaluates the scientific merits, citation requires the paper to have given the citing person insight.
To make an article understandable, it has to follow a standard of symbolism and language, first of all. This is well known, but often when I try to read a paper in an unfamiliar field I find that I don't have any idea of the notation that circulates only in a tight group of specialists. Searching for definitions of symbols is very painful. Tools like Google don't make it easy to search for non-natural-language expressions, many of which do not even permit search engines to sniff them anyways.
If a result is important, specialists will tend to use it frequently and clarify the idea after maybe 5 or 10 years. A researcher would only serve himself though to write clearly and be understood immediately.
Space and time are horrible constraints for researchers that are starting out and need to have quantity for the sake of keeping a job. The writing quality is dubious as a result. Suppose, then, after centuries of research writing, boilerplate formats are used to keep writing style and content on track. It helps writers not familiar with what to present as well as standardizes the language. Though many researchers would care to stick out like sore thumbs by publishing on a boilerplate, I would find it a lot easier to read.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The problem is that undergraduate students in the United States who are attracted to research universities, and who presumably are attracted to becoming the next generation of researchers, aren't getting the training and attention in their undergraduate years, despite paying premium prices. Just look at this research-oriented university:
http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932
Likewise, an article in the Stanford Report by Ray Delgado (published May 19, 2004) admitted that Stanford's faculty were apathetic towards undergraduates:
Meanwhile, faculty have no trouble (or lack of time) to pursue their own interests, such as consulting for companies that sell services to Stanford. An article "Campus Brawl" by Deborah Gage (June 8, 2004) reported:
Serving on the board of directors is a paid position (at the very least $30,000 annually). Isn't it convenient that there are three professors paid by Oracle to serve on its board, and that the university then paid Oracle for $93 million of services? Apparently, the university's president John Hennessy is not immune from the tempations of wealth -- or conflict of interest. An article by Amit Arora in the Stanford Daily, February 26, 2007, reported
I happened to stumble on to the recent list of winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Most of them seem to be from the US. This is not meant to come off as bragging about our country, just to point out that maybe we're not doing that bad.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Have you seen Zorro? See, all this huge chunk on the south of USA used to be Mexico. All those Spanish names for places weren't because someone considered it trendy at the time.
BTW, Mexicans should be proud of their roots. Just like everyone else. We are all just a bunch of apes learning to control our primitive impulses and get over of the atrocities we made to each other so far like slavery, racism, oppresion, chauvinism, war, and fanatic religion.
The allocation of research funding is indeed a shambles, but then, so is academia. Academic politics are some of the worst and most vicious in the human experience. Often credibility in research communities is predicated on who your advisor is rather than the technical merit of your contribution. And while the pseudo sciences like sociology and paleo-whatever are the worst in this regard, in my experience it is a pervasive problem. That being said, like every problem there are several causes. One of the worst is the constant pressure to be a genius. Genius cannot be forced, though people constantly try or try to emulate genius closely enough to pass. It is the second group that causes the most trouble by abusing their sway in the academic world and by abdicating their responsibilities to quash competing ideas that are better than theirs.
/. discussions on science my guess is quite a lot.
Sorry, but i'm going to touch the stem cell bit because the recent history so clearly illustrates the failings of our current scientific politic. In my opinion, the root issue was the lack of sensitivity to the fact that embryonic stem cells (at the time) could only be collected by destroying a proto-human being. Many in that research community and their lay followers knew the issue would cause contention, but didn't care for a variety of reasons, like an "analysis" of the potential good versus the distastefulness of the means (and make no doubt, there is an element of religion to science in the popular domain, especially in health matters.) The two sides quickly polarized and several teams of researchers moved to various countries (mostly South American if memory serves) after Bush banned the funding of most stem cell research. The polarization was so complete that when methods were developed to extract some stem cells without obvious detriment to the embryo, it was to no political avail in the US. Had the researchers and their supporters been more sensitive and worked towards finding a way to diffuse the situation (say by concentrating on finding the way to not destroy the embryo early on) instead of getting nonplussed and giving the other side the bird, maybe things would have turned out differently.
And just because we imagine a research area to be clean, neat, and uninspiring of ethical dilemmas does not make it the case. Thus far physics research has been the source of our most destructive capabilities. During the Manhattan Project, we had no idea about radiation poisoning, and so many people died or were maimed during the course of that research. On the reverse side, nuclear weapon effects are vilified beyond the reality. Yes radiation is bad, nasty, and evil, but it does not make an area uninhabitable for 1000+ years as the conventional wisdom holds. People live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, and those bombs are were far dirtier than those we have today.
Modern particle physics is not without ethical issues either. The newer accelerators caused some physicists to have concerns regarding various potential disastrous outcomes from their use. They were taken seriously enough to get a committee to look at the issue, whose report can be found at:
http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/disaster.htm
Obviously they found that the device was safe. For various values of safe and various values of considering all variables. Since some of the potential outcomes included the destruction of the planet at a minimum, was it ethical for them to proceed? In the past, wars have been fought over less. So, in the unlikely event that say the government had decided it was too risky, and the closest "safe" alternative was for instance the moon, how much of an uproar would there be about the government interfering in science? From the tenor of most
The point is that physics deals with how the universe around us works. Some of those mechanisms are known to be inimical to human life in close proximity. Others are unknown, but I'd bet ther
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
This is true in academics and in business. If you are working on a thesis, you have to do something that you can complete or you won't get the MA or PhD. The same thing with working on grants. As for business or government work, it's even worse.
Research is dead, so all our future progress is going to be incremental. No new tech revolutions in the future, because revolutions require risk.
US researchers do tend to have better articles than foreign ones. A big trend among European (cough Italian) biologists is to publish as many small experiments in low impact journals as they can. High impact journals publish articles that have a lot bigger scope. A lot of new journals have been popping up in recent years because of the ease of electronic publishing and pretty much every crappy journal showing up on pubmed searches that this makes a lot of money for publishers. This makes for a lot of crappy articles being published that no one really believes/reads. A garbage BMS neuroscience article does not even come close to equaling a Nature paper.
In terms of revenue, a star athlete can earn more money than a star scientist, but a star scientist can singlehandedly bring more revenue to the employer, and to the entire economy, than even the best athlete. Compare the market for athletes with e.g. the market for white LEDs.
Is the real worth of a person dependent only on its paycheck?
Athletes are -1 overrated.
decrease in pub not = decrease research
may mean increase in classified &| commercial secret research
patents issued still high in u.s.
maybe other unknown factors too.
not to trust media reports.
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-vie w.asp?tid=8902&posts=59&start=1
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-vie w.asp?tid=7868&posts=1197&start=1
With an intelligent plan of action, NASA could retire the Shuttle, build an even better replacement using the best parts of the Shuttle stack, go to the moon, and STILL have money left over for lots of good basic science. Unfortunately, because of cronyism and corruption, ATK-Thiokol will be getting the lions share of NASA's budget for the next several years.