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Tuesday, August 5, 2014

The Scientists who matter most !

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




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