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

Re:Who's wondering why?

[PopeRatzo]

It's not only the research that is under political attack in the US. Science itself is under attack in this country like never before.

You can hear, every single day, "Science" sneered at in the same dismissive tone as "The Media" on talk radio and blogs of a certain political stripe. When someone doesn't like the results of research, they just go find some hungry grad of Regent U. who'll gin up a paper that says the opposite. The same way that when someone doesn't like what's happening in their world, they'll just say "oh, that's just The Media".

We have museums in the US with exhibits that claim that Science proves that God created the world. That's enough to discourage a real scientist right there.

When I was a little kid, being a scientist was one of the coolest things you could be. Hell, I used to play with chemistry sets so I could pretend to be a scientist. No, today "Science" is under such constant attack I'm not surprised that people would rather become consultants to some corporation or move overseas to work.

Re:They make cheap shit.

[IdleTime]

As Lil'Bush said: "Science is not based on facts, if it was, it would not be called science-fiction., but science-faction!"