The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011 was published in September. The report examined R&D trends over the last ten years. One trend noted by the report was that in 2009 the business sector accounted for the majority of R&D expenditures, measured as a percentage of GERD (gross domestic expenditures on R&D), in most countries. In OECD countries, 70% of R&D was performed by business in 2008. The US, EU, Japan and Korea accounted for 41%, 30%, 15% and 5%, respectively, of OECD countries’ total 2009 GERD (for the US and Korea, 2008 is the most current information available). As a percentage, China’s GERD is equal to 13% of total 2009 GERD for OECD countries. Other R&D trends in the report involved patents, high-impact universities, scientific collaborations, clean technology development, scientific publications, R&D expenditures and types of R&D funding.

The Scoreboard examined patent documents that cited non-patent literature (NPL). Most patent applications contain a list of citations to earlier patents and to NPL, which includes scientific papers, conference proceedings and databases. According to OECD calculations based on European Patent Office’s (EPO) Worldwide Patent Statistical Database, the percentage of patent documents that cited NPL from 2005 to 2010 varied by field, but on average 20% of citations to patents in the 38 scientific fields listed in the report contained NPL. As illustrated in the graph on this page, this figure was highest among biotechnology (54%), biomaterials (46%) and pharmaceuticals (36%) patent documents. This is indicative of these three fields performing more original research.

The Scoreboard also examined the location of the highest-impact universities in 16 scientific areas. As of 2009, most of these high-impact universities were based in the US, according to the OECD’s and SCImago Research Group’s forthcoming “Report on Scientific Production.” In fact, 40 of the top 50 universities in all disciplines are located in the US. The rest are located in Europe. By specific field, however, there is more diversity among geographic location. The table on this page highlights the countries with the highest-impact universities in seven fields. High-impact universities in these same fields are also scattered in additional locales such as South Africa, which has a top university in immunology; India and Brazil, which each have a top university in the field of pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceuticals; and Spain and Hong Kong, which one have a top university in chemistry.

The Scoreboard also compiled data on collaborations and scientific publications. According to the OECD and SCImago Research Group, collaboration is becoming increasingly important to the scientific community, as countries are teaming up more and more to produce scientific papers and patented inventions. However, aside from Poland and India, more countries collaborate on scientific publications than on patented inventions. There is a positive relationship between research collaboration and scientific impact, as measured by the number of citations of a scientific publication. Smaller countries generally partake in more international collaborations, which may be due in part to inadequate opportunities to collaborate domestically. The countries that collaborated internationally on more than 50% of scientific publications from 2007 to 2009 were Austria, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, Israel, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The US collaborated internationally on 42% of publications in all scientific fields. The UK, the Russian Federation, Korea, Japan, India and China did so on 42%, 32%, 25%, 22%, 18% and 14% of publications, respectively.

The Scoreboard analyzed contributing fields to patents for clean energy technologies. Patents for clean energy technologies cited papers in a variety of scientific fields. OECD calculations based on the Scopus Custom Data, Elsevier and the EPO’s Worldwide Patent Statistical Database reveal that of the scientific fields that contributed to patents for clean energy technologies in 2000–2009, materials science was the top field, accounting for 24% of the NPL cited in patents for clean energy technologies. Chemistry; energy; biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology; immunology and microbiology; agricultural and biological sciences; and environmental science contributed 19%, 10%, 5%, 3%, 2% and 2%, of the NPL cited, respectively.

The Scoreboard also examined the relationship between quality and quantity of scientific publications. Quality does not appear to be linked with quality, according to the OECD and SCImago Research Group’s analysis of countries’ scientific publications per 1,000 inhabitants. This was true both for the top-quartile journals and other journals, as well as for the total number of its publications. Top-quartile journals are defined as “the most influential 25% of the world’s scholarly journals in their category,” as ranked by SCImago Journal Rank. Only 13 countries had more than one publication per 1,000 inhabitants that appeared in top-quartile journals in 2009, led by Switzerland (2.19), Sweden (1.61) and Denmark (1.60). The US’s ratio was 0.895 publications per 1,000 inhabitants for the top-quartile journals, and it was leader in the total number of publications in all journals counted, with 472,600 publications in 2009. China was number two, producing 285,400 publications. But only 0.051 publications per 1,000 inhabitants in China appeared in top-quartile journals.

The Scoreboard also examined the relationship between researchers and R&D expenditure. The number of researchers in a country tends to correlate with its R&D as a percentage of GDP. According to OECD’s Main Science and Technology Indicators Database, in 2009, more than 4.2 million researchers were involved with R&D in OECD countries. OECD countries averaged about 7.6 researchers per 1,000 people employed in 2009, up from 6.6 per 1,000 in 1999. Countries that employed more than ten researchers per 1,000 employed were Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Japan, Korea and New Zealand. Personnel costs, which include researcher costs, are the primary expense for R&D expenditures in most countries. This fact accounts for the connection between R&D as a percentage of GDP and the number of researchers per total employed. R&D as a percentage of GDP was at least 1.8% in all aforementioned countries.

The Scoreboard found that most of the 15 countries highlighted in the report rely more on institution-based funding than on project-based funding. Among the countries examined, Denmark relied the most on institution-based funding, with 97% of its government funding of R&D in higher education being institution-based in 2008 (the most current year for which data is available). Israel, New Zealand and Germany followed with 95%, 93% and 89%, respectively. Korea and Belgium utilized project-based funding the most, with 82% and 64% of government support for higher education considered project based, respectively. These figures are based on preliminary data from the OECD’s 2009–2010 Microdata project on public R&D funding. However, the OECD noted that “international comparability is currently limited.”

 Bar Graph: Percentage of Citations to Patents That Include NPL by Technology Field, 2005–2010 

 Biotechnology:           53.7%

 Biomaterials:            45.9%

 Pharmaceuticals:         35.7%

 Organic Chemistry:       25.0%

 Food Chemistry:          23.5%

 Materials, Metallurgy:   10.6%

 Materials Chemistry:     10.6%

 Solar Energy:             9.9%

 Polymers:                 8.2%

 Optics:                   8.1%

 Fuel Cells:               7.4%

 Surface and Coating:      6.9%

 Environmental Tech.:      5.3%

 Geographical Distribution of Top 50 Highest-Impact Universities in Countries with at Least Two Top 50 High-Impact Universities, 2009

        Ag.& Bio.Sci.  Bio-chem.,Genet.&Mol.Bio.  Chem.    Env.Sci.   Immun.&Micro-bio.   Mat.Sci.  Pharma-col.,Tox.&Pharma.

 US            27                   35             39         27            35              32                27

 UK            12                    7              2         10             4               5                 2

 France         2      

 Netherlands    2                    2              2          3             1               2                 1

 Switzerland    4                    5              2          2             2               2 

 Italy                                              1                                                          3

 Canada                                                        2             2               1                 3

 Germany        2                                   1          1             2    

 Belgium                                                       2                                               1

 Australia                                                     1             1               3                 1

 China                                                                                       1                 6

 Sweden         1                                              1                             2  

 Denmark                                                       1             1               1 

 Japan                                                                       1               1                 3