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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.'"
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.
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
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 -----------------------------------
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]
I recently heard a excellent joke from a friend of mine who still works in scientific research:
Q: What is an American University?
A: This is a strange place where Russian professors teach Chinese students in English.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The US will always have it's place at the top table
Why is that? You're chosen by God?
This kind of attitude has been heard many times before going back through history. Ask the Brits. Or the Spanish. Or the French. Or the Chinese. Or the Iranians (yes, they too where once "at the top table"). I could go on, but you get the point I hope...
When my great grandmother was alive the Brits dominated the world as comprehensively as the USA does today.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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The top US academic institutions have the most money of any in the world, by far.
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Money can facilitate research, and hence the top researchers tend to go where the money is (so they can accomplish the most they possibly can).
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The US is a large country, but small compared to the entire world. Japan has almost half as many people as the US. The EU has more. Let's not forget Russia. And then there are China and India.
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Speaking of China and India, education is rapidly increasing there, leading them to actually generate an 'industrialized nation' share of scientists proportional to their population.
Given all these factors, you shouldn't be surprised at all that the faculty at top US academic institutions are diverse. It might have nothing to do with any 'decline' of US capabilities (I'm not saying there isn't such a thing, just that this particular observation doesn't really support it).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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.