Britain is tops among research-heavy nations, according to a report from the UK's Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills. While the UK accounts for 0.9 percent of the global population, it produces nearly 16 percent of the world's most highly cited papers, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
The BIS report, put together by Elsevier, examines the research activity and output, investment, and IP in the UK as compared to Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the US as well as to rising researcher programs in Brazil, India and Russia.
"The UK is a highly productive research nation in terms of articles and citation outputs per researcher or per unit of R&D expenditure, resulting from a trend towards increasing outputs from broadly stable or decreasing inputs," the report says. "It is likely that recent increases in UK research productivity have, at least to some extent, been driven by the increase in UK international research collaboration, which is also associated with greater citation impact."