With Scientific Research Papers, Balance Of Trade Now Favors The U.S.

Editor's Note: While the latest reports out of Washington, D.C., reveal that the United States continues to import far more goods from foreign nations than it exports to them, the trade balance is much more favorable to the U.S. in terms of its science products--the research papers that are, so to speak, made in America. This conclusion was arrived at late last year by the monthly newsletter Science Watch, which compared the frequency with which U.S. papers and those from all other nations were cited during the years 1987-91. The analysis--based on data from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, which publishes the newsletter--showed, among other things, that U.S. papers were being referred to in excess of 50 percent more often than papers from other countries. Results of the Science Watch study were published in the September 1992 issue of the newsletter. The report is reprinted here with the permission of the newsletter and of ISI. U.S. PAPERS U.S. WORLD U.S.: RANK FIELD 1987-91 IMPACT IMPACT WORLD (BY %) 1 Physics 66,353 5.64 3.37 +67.4 2 Chemistry 56,968 4.02 2.47 +62.8 3 Geosciences 19,897 3.53 2.32 +52.2 4 Computer Sciences 14,444 1.59 1.05 +51.4 5 Materials Science 13,019 1.40 .94 +48.9 6 Biology 229,228 6.71 4.82 +39.2 7 Astronomy 12,319 6.05 4.44 +36.3 8 Engineering 32,175 1.42 1.06 +34.0 9 Agriculture and Environmental Science 31,425 1.99 1.58 +25.9 10 Mathematics 18,229 1.34 1.07 +25.2 11 Clinical Medicine 150,455 3.72 3.15 +18.1 12 Plant and Animal Science 55,098 2.03 1.86 + 9.1 Source: Science Watch / Institute for Scientific Information When the world's researchers sit down to settle their intellectual debts, many send their payments to the United States. Their "checks" take the form of citations, overt references in an author's writings that serve both to acknowledge debts and to cancel them. Each year, the Institute for Scientific Information follows this "money trail" worldwide. In 1991, it recorded more than 12.2 million individual citation payments. As the figures presented here show, the current trade balance in research is decidedly in favor of the U.S. When one considers articles of every type from every field, U.S. papers are currently taking in 52 percent more citations per paper than the world average. Of course, the "trade surplus" for the U.S. varies by field, and there are even a few fields in which America has been running up a deficit lately. To obtain the best assessment of various fields and subfields of U.S. research, Science Watch examined articles (original reports or discovery accounts only, but not reviews, letters, editorials, and so forth) that were published and cited between 1987 and 1991 and that carried at least one U.S. author address. The citations- per-paper averages for U.S. papers of different types were then compared to the corresponding world averages and the percentage difference calculated. For example, physics papers published by U.S. researchers from 1987 to 1991 attained an impact score (that is, citations per paper) of 5.64 during this same five-year period, whereas the average for the world was 3.37. Thus, U.S. physics papers were cited some 67.4 percent more than the world average. Indeed, physics (including theoretical and applied physics, optics, and acoustics) is the field in which the U.S. holds the largest lead in citation impact compared with the world as a whole. Other areas of the physical sciences--chemistry and geosciences--follow close behind at +62.8 percent and +52.2 percent, respectively. Computer sciences, too, at +51.4 percent, earned more than half again the world's average citations per paper. RANK FIELD PERCENT 1 Astronomy 46.8 2 Computer~ Sciences 40.9 3 Mathematics 39.5 4 Geosciences 37.0 5 Biology 35.4 6 Plant and~ Animal ~Sciences 31.4 7 Engineering 30.6 8 Agricultural and ~Environmental ~Sciences 30.4 9 Physics 26.8 10 Clinical ~Medicine 26.2 11 Chemistry 20.1 12 Materials ~Science 19.1 Source: Science Watch / Institute for Scientific Information The middle group includes fields in which the U.S. tallied between one-third and one-half more citations per paper than the world. This foursome is diverse in both subject matter and size. Materials science, in fifth place with a relative citation impact score of +48.9 percent, is tiny compared with biology, sixth at +39.2 percent and with more than 17 times the number of materials science papers. Astronomy and engineering come seventh and eighth, at +36.3 percent and +34.0 percent, respectively. Agriculture and environmental sciences, mathematics, clinical medicine, and plant and animal sciences were all cited up to a third more than the world average. In terms of world share of papers published within the group of international journals that ISI indexes, the ranking for the U.S. is a bit different. In some high-impact areas, such as computer sciences and geosciences, the U.S. holds a substantial share of the papers. On the other hand, in physics, chemistry, and materials science, the U.S. share is relatively small, although the impact of U.S. papers is high. As it turned out, there was no correlation between impact and world share. As always, taking the average of many members in a set can sometimes mask extremes contained within the set. For example, as mentioned, biology as a field turns in a moderately strong performance, collecting 39.2 percent more citations than the world average. But U.S. papers in the subfield of microbiology and cell biology do almost twice as well (+74.0 percent). Likewise, plant and animal sciences, the field in which the U.S. holds the slimmest lead relative to the rest of the world (+9.1 percent), includes aquatic sciences and veterinary medicine, which attracted 27.2 percent, and medicine, which attracted 27.2 and 24.5 percent more citations per paper than the world average, respectively. Only two U.S. subfields underperformed the world average. One is petrology/mining (-3.7 percent). The other is orthopedic medicine, the poorest performer at -13.5 percent compared to the world.

With Scientific Research Papers, Balance Of Trade Now Favors The U.S.

The Scientist Staff

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