PJ: President Obama has made it clear that the US must improve education of its youth in both science and math if it wants to successfully compete in the world economic stage. While other countries cheer their advancements in these fields, the US could very well be left behind sooner rather than later if the country fails to heed the advise of their president.
Hurriyet Daily News
Turkey improves its science research as China set to outpace US
As China is set to overtake the US in scientific output in few years, Turkey's improved scientific performance had been almost as dramatic as China's, says a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK's national science academy. While the top 10 is still dominated by the major Western powers, their share of research papers published is falling
While China has shot to second place in the number of articles published in international science magazines and in a few years will take the top spot from the United States, Turkey ranked as on the rise at a rate almost rivaling that of China, according to a new report.
“China has increased its publications to the extent that it is now the second highest producer of research output in the world and some time before 2020 it is expected to surpass the U.S.,” said the report released Monday by the Royal Society in London.
While the top 10 is still dominated by the major Western powers, their share of research papers published is falling, according to the report. “And as well as China, Brazil and India are coming up fast.”
Although, being further behind, Turkey and Iran are among the countries making dramatic progress.
“Turkey has improved its scientific performance at a rate almost rivaling that of China. Having declared research a public priority in the 1990s, the Turkish government increased its spending on research and development, or R&D, nearly six-fold between 1995 and 2007, and now spends more annually in cash terms than either Denmark, Finland or Norway. Over this period, the proportion of Turkey’s GDP spent on R&D rose from 0.28 percent to 0.72 percent, and the number of researchers increased by 43 percent. Four times as many papers were published in 2008 as in 1996,” the report said.
According to the report, the number of publications from Iran has grown from just 736 in 1996 to 13,238 in 2008 – “making it the fastest growing country in terms of numbers of scientific publications in the world.
While the United States remained in the top spot, it saw its share shrink from 26.4 percent to 21.2 percent. Britain remained third with its share at 6.5 percent, down from 7.1 percent. In a statement last week after Britain's budget however, the Royal Society welcomed finance minister George Osborne's promise of another 100 million pounds ($160 million) of capital investment in science, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. Japan slipped from second to fourth place, falling from 7.8 percent to 6.1 percent, said the report.
The Royal Society's findings were published in its report entitled "Knowledge, networks and nations: Global scientific collaboration in the 21st century," and the figures were based on the papers published in recognized international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier.
The report said Turkey is among the countries which decreasing their collaborations. “While the U.S., Europe and Japan are demonstrating a growing propensity to collaborate with global partners, China, Turkey and Iran are proportionally decreasing their collaborations.”
Furthermore, ambitious scientific nations such as Saudi Arabia and South Africa are also increasing their relative collaboration, said the report.
‘Bridge-building collaboration’
Despite political tensions between the U.S. and Iran, “scientific collaboration has proven surprisingly resilient,” according to the report. “Between the periods 1996 to 2002 to 2004 to 2008, co-authored papers between these two countries increased from just 388 papers to 1,831 papers, an increase of 472 percent. Following the Iranian elections in June 2009, Iranian scientists called out to the international research community to ‘do everything possible to promote continued contact with colleagues in Iran, if only to promote detente between Iran and the West when relations are contentious.”
The report said such pleas reflect the potential of international collaboration to help repair fractious relations, or at least to maintain channels of communication. “A distinct benefit of scientific collaboration is that it can act as a bridge to communities where political ties are weaker.”
As an example of this bridge building, the report said, “the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East, or SESAME, under construction in Jordan “has the potential not only to build scientific capacity in the region but also to foster collaboration.”
Modeled on CERN in Europe, SESAME is a partnership between Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey. “Synchrotrons are large and relatively expensive facilities, so pooling regional resources is the obvious way to construct SESAME,” the report said.
“It has been suggested that today’s scientific world is characterized by self-organizing networks, bringing together scientists who collaborate not because they are told to but because they want to,” said the report.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=turkey-improves-science-research-as-china-set-to-outstrip-us-2011-03-29
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