Friday, December 28, 2007

Canada's impact factor

I ran across some statistics that showed Canada has a pretty decent citations per paper published according to in-cites.com. Apparently after Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, England and the United States, Canada has an average of 11.14 citations / publication. That suggests to me that Canadian researchers are producing some quality research publications. The USA publishes WAY more papers than any other country and it's all obviously in English. So perhaps having English as an official language in Canada helps as we publish a lot of papers that may be cited by English speaking US researchers. If you are interested in some better analysis of where Canada sits internationally check out this somewhat old Nature paper (2004, subscription req.) What is disturbing to me is that despite being obviously productive researchers, this is not reflected in the Canadian governments investment in research. We are ranked 14th in health research funding!! Also check out patents granted / capita which is pretty interesting, go Iceland! These stats are of course to be taken with a grain of salt however I still find them interesting.


5 comments:

Bayman said...

Could this suggest that limiting funding promotes innovation and increases the quality of science (ie Canada), whereas excessive funding maybe makes researchers lazy and risk-averse (ie USA)?

Bayman said...

Some interesting info re how ISI calculates citation index, especially in light of recent allegations by JCB that they fudge their data.

rasmussenanders said...

Those are some interesting statistics! I had always thought that papers from the united states recieved way more citations but it seems the difference is not so great.

Do you know where you can find info about the number of articles per capita or in different countries? Which country is producing most articles?

Anonymous said...

Wow, Luxemburg is ridiculous. How many patents on false teeth and watches can one get¿

Bayman said...

Why is Bermuda off the charts in citations per paper?