There’s nothing like a TV interview request to focus the mind on a piece of overlooked research. That’s what happened to me the other day when I received a call from CCTV, a 24-hour English language news service in China, asking for my on-camera comments on a new UNESCO report that I had completely missed. A quick perusal of the report on scientific research, innovation, and higher education, which was released at UNESCO’s Paris HQ on November 10, revealed a storyline that has become familiar in recent years: “USA, Europe, and Japan increasingly challenged by emerging countries” read the headline of an accompanying press-release.
The study highlights statistic upon statistic documenting the erosion of the long-established scientific dominance of North America, the European Union, and Japan. For instance: Asia’s share of the world’s R&D spending, or GERD (for gross domestic expenditure on research and development), grew from 27 to 32 percent from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea. The EU, Japan, and the United States saw decreases during the same period. In the same vein, the U.S. proportion of articles in Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index (SCI), while still the highest in the world, fell more than that of any other country from 2002 to 2008, dropping from about 30.9 to 27.7 percent. Meantime, the number of Chinese publications recorded in the SCI more than doubled. Ditto for Brazil. And so on.
To read the full, original article click on this link: The Research Challenge from Emerging Nations: No, The Sky Is Not Falling - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Author: Ben Wildavsky
