New analysis that suggests the UK is producing only the same amount of groundbreaking science as Switzerland, Singapore and Denmark should shatter a national complacency that has led to persistent underfunding of research, science policy experts have claimed.
The UK’s ability to punch above its weight in research is often illustrated by the fact that it produces 13 per cent of highly cited publications (the world’s top 1 per cent most-cited papers) despite having less than 1 per cent of all researchers globally.
But a new study by Paul Nightingale, deputy director of the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit, and former Downing Street science adviser James Phillips, now at UCL, suggests that this most-cited statistic is “a potentially misleading basis for claiming the UK is at the cutting edge of science and technology” because it represents about 18,000 papers a year when, for some subjects, “there may be only a dozen papers at most that really shift the dial each year”.
Analysing the 100 most-cited papers for three disciplines highlighted as priority areas by the UK government in this month’s revised Integrated Review – artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing – the study found that the UK’s contribution to these world-leading studies was far lower than expected.
