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.'"

Comments

Also

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost half of researchers working in US establishments are foreign. We just don't have the homegrown talent any more.

Re: Citations

[Carewolf]

Maybe in a perfect world. In the real world you know who is going to review it, simply because there is a limited number of people capable of reviewing your article, and the journals reuse the same reviewers all the time.

Re:It's the patent system

[MobyDisk]

Except you can still patent after you publish. You have 1 year in the US, and I believe that rule applies to the EU as well. It's actually better to publish ASAP so that you establish your claim before anyone else.

Re:Not true

[TheRaven64]

The impression I have is that a lot of foreign countries grant tenure based purely on the number of publications, not the quality. In the UK, the RAE system requires academics to submit one paper per year on average (actually four every four years) for evaluation. While most publish more than one paper a year, it is possible to get the top classification if you only publish one paper a year, as long as it's a sufficiently high-impact paper. The USA has much more of a focus on the number of publications than the we do.

Re:Who's wondering why?

[jcgf]

I don't think he meant uneducated amateurs but rather people that have their PhD AND enough money to pursue their research without need of grants and such.

US continues to lead in Computer Networks research

[slashdotmsiriv]

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.

A little balance

[benhocking]

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.