The most influential Newspaper in Canada, the 'Globe and Mail' published the results of a Thomson Reuters ranking of 3200 researchers who have made the most significant impact on science worldwide.
This list shows the top 15 countries in terms of actual numbers of research scientists active within those countries, as well as the number of scientists relative to the number of population.
It is interesting to note that China and Saudi Arabia are included in this listing for the first time.
The USA spends the most of all countries on basic research and the results are quite obvious.
Money, however, is not the sole determining factor in attracting researchers from all over the world to the USA. The spirit of freedom and unfettered research conditions contribute to the migration of many of the scientists to the USA.
# Country #of scientists per 1 mio
1 United States 1,616 5.15
2 United Kingdom 291 4.57
3 Germany 157 1.95
4 China 141 0.10
5 Japan 94 0.74
6 Canada 89 2.56
7 France 80 1.22
8 Netherlands 74 4.42
9 Australia 65 2.86
10 Switzerland 64 8.00
11 Italy 52 0.87
12 Spain 42 0.92
13 Belgium 32 2.88
14 Saudi Arabia 30 1.08
15 Sweden 28 2.94
The effort is driven mostly by Universities and research institutes who would like to know how their efforts are reflected in the world wide results.
In order to determine what is happening in the world of science and research, science was divided into 21 categories, from Agriculture to Space. With the help of sophisticated computers each category was examined as to the number of mentions a scientist's work was quoted by other researchers.
The methodology employed by Thompson Reuters is, of course, considerably more sofisticated than can be described here
No comments:
Post a Comment