What different countries get for their research spending

July 19, 2004 8:52 AM

The scientific productivity of nations(pdf). An article by the UK's chief scientific advisor, published this week in Nature, quantitating the scientific output of different countries, normalized to per capita GDP, area of study, number of researchers, higher education research spending, and more. A commentary, from a UK perspective.
posted by shoos (6 comments total)

That graph on page 4 is very cool just for its layout. Is there a name for that?
posted by Space Coyote at 9:08 AM on July 19, 2004

spider graph
posted by tripitaka at 9:17 AM on July 19, 2004

This is a very interesting study, though I'd like to point out that it fails to give credit to countries for their scientific diasporas (if I understood the way the paper assigns authors to countries). Thus countries like India and Russia are underrepresented despite their educational system having produced the researchers that then leave in search of richer salaries.
In Greece (where I have an idea of the scale of the phenomenon) active cited researchers living and working abroad outnumber the local researchers by a very wide margin (possibly 3 to 1)... I can imagine that in, say, Russia or Egypt, the margin is even wider
posted by talos at 10:32 AM on July 19, 2004

Canada kicks effective ass inexpensively!
posted by srboisvert at 1:29 PM on July 19, 2004

Those fucking luxemborgers sure arn't pulling their weight!
posted by delmoi at 3:56 PM on July 19, 2004

um...Canada kicks ass inexpensively thanks to its neighbor to the south
posted by ParisParamus at 4:07 PM on July 19, 2004