(NAS Colloquium) Science, Technology and the Economy (1996) / Chapter Skim
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Measuring science: An exploration
Measuring science: An exploration
Pages 10-16
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From page 10... ...
We look at these numbers for science and engineering as a whole, for five selected major fields, and at the individual university field level. The published data in Science and Engineering Indicators imply sharply diminishing returns to academic R&D using published papers as an "output" measure.
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From page 11... ...
.§ This deflator grew significantly faster than the implicit gross domestic product deflator during 1981-1991, 6.6% per year versus 4.1%. It grew even faster relative to the BEA implicit deflator for R&D performed in industry, which is only growing at 3.6% per year during this period.
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From page 12... ...
The numbers look better if one uses total citations as one's "output" measure, but after adjusting them for growing duplication (we can make this adjustment only at the total field level) the story of mathematics is still a puzzle, and adding computer sciences does not solve it.1T Fields by Universities To try and get a better understanding of what is happening to research productivity we turn to the less aggregated and more relevant level of fields in individual universities.
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From page 13... ...
The first two columns report the estimated coefficients of the logarithm of lagged R&D with weights 0.25, 0.5, and 0.25, respectively, for R&D lagged one, two, and three years, and the coefficients of a linear time trend, based on two different paper series and different time periods. The estimated R&D coefficients hover around 0.5, indicating rather sharply diminishing returns to the individual university effort, with medicine having a somewhat higher coefficient and mathematics an even lower one.ll Again, except for mathematics, the trend coefficients are positive and significant, indicating that this tendency to diminishing returns at the individual university level is counteracted to a significant extent by the external contribution of the advances in knowledge in the field (and in science)
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From page 14... ...
The last column of Table 4 reports parallel results using an 8-year difference in these moving average variables, allowing thereby for the possible influence of unmeasured individual university effects on research productivity. (The same is also true for the 4-year difference-based results, not shown, using the S&E variables reported in Table 5.)
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From page 15... ...
All of this, however, will still leave us looking "within" science, at its internal output, without being able to say much about its overall, external societal impact. An Inconclusive Conclusion From the numbers we have one could conclude that United States academic science has been facing diminishing returns in terms of papers produced per R&D dollar, both because of the rising cost of achieving new results within specific scientific fields and because of rising competition due to the expanding overall size of the scientific enterprise, both within the United States and worldwide, impinging on a relatively slowly growing publication outlets universe.
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From page 16... ...
A final difference is that the CHI data follow the CASPAR fields to the letter, whereas the ISI data on papers and citations by university and field appear originally in a more disaggregated form than the biological and medical fields of our regressions. We combined "biology and biochemistry" and "molecular biology and genetics" to form biology.
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