Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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
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.
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?
"No child left behind?"
I think a major part of the problem is that the U.S. public education system has an overwhelming focus on bringing the slow learning underachievers up to par. Far too little is done to accelerate and unleash the potential of the best and brightest. Raise your hand if you were in the public education system and got all 'A' and 'B' grades while rarely or never bringing a book home with you. I susepct that most of the readers here were taking AP or college prep classes as well.
With idiotic programs like "No child left behind" the entire herd has to move at the pace of the slowest member. For example, I know an elementary school teacher that has a small group of students who are children of recent immigrants. They barely speak English, yet the school is supposed to make sure that they don't get "left behind"? Where do you think she needs to focus all of her extra effort? The phrase is emotionally pleasing, but the implementation has serious negative consequences (I HOPE they are unintended, but I'm not sure). I think that kids SHOULD be left behind a lot more frequently than they are.
I'd be in favor of getting the Federal government out of the public education system entirely. We should eliminate the Dept.of Education and distribute the entire department budget as block grants to the states for the next couple of years.
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.
There's a lot of truth in that joke. I recently attended a conference in Atlanta where not one of the presenters was a native English speaker. I couldn't understand them and they couldn't understand each other, but it made me think about how much harder it will be for us Americans if we lose the "home team" advantage of having so many important conferences relatively nearby and the most prestigious conferences and journals in English. It's amazing how well non-native English speakers do despite the additional challenge of a language barrier. Could we do the same? I find getting published hard enough, what if I had to write in Chinese? Success is a self-reinforcing thing (I guess that's why we have words like "hegemony" and "monopoly") and this implies there is a tipping point - the leader won't fall behind until they're truly inferior, but then the fall will be quick. I hope we're not that close to the brink but this is no time to rest on our laurels.