

U.S. Science and Engineering Research Flattens 273
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "The National Science Foundation is reporting that the number of published U.S. science and engineering articles plateaued in the 1990s, despite continued increases in funding and personnel for research and development. This came after two decades of continued growth. Since then, flattening has occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions. In contrast, Asian and EU research had significant increases in this period. They do point to one positive for the US, however: article quality. According to one of the researchers, 'the more often an article is cited by other publications, the higher quality it's believed to have. While citation is not a perfect indicator, U.S. publications are more highly cited than those from other countries.'"
Also (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Citations (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's the patent system (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not true (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who's wondering why? (Score:3, Informative)
US continues to lead in Computer Networks research (Score:3, Informative)
Take SIGCOMM for example. It is arguably the top conference in networking. It is the most reputable
among computer networks researchers and it happens to be among the top 4 most cited conferences
in computer science in general ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/impact.html [psu.edu]
http://libra.msra.cn/conf_category_24.htm [libra.msra.cn]).
Out of the 33 papers in SIGCOMM 2007, there are 29 papers from American research centers
(MIT, UCB, UCSD, Cornell, CMU, SDSC etc ). There are only 4 from Europe (Polytechnico di Torino, TUD, Delft, INRIA).
The truth is that the number of European and Chinese Publications in top Networking and Systems Conferences
has increased substantially (there used to be a time that a top conference would have at most one non-US publication).
This however, by no means can be interpreted as the quality of US research in communication networks degrading.
It simply means that the rest of the world is beginning to realize the benefits of fundamental communication
networks research. Still, Europe and Asia have long way to go.
A little balance (Score:3, Informative)