UK R&D spending has not kept up with the rate of global R&D spending, despite increasing by about one-third in real terms from 1991 to 2009. In 2008, the UK’s share of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) was 4%, down slightly more than a percentage point from 1991. The US’s share of OECD GERD stayed close to 42% throughout the same period. While the number of researchers in the US and Germany grew by roughly one-half and one-fourth, respectively, from 1991 to 2008, the number of researchers in the UK doubled to 250,000 researchers—6% of the world’s total. The UK comprised 8% of global research articles in 2008. The number of UK scientific papers in the top 1% of the world’s most highly cited papers between 2000 and 2010 was 13,510, or 14% of the global total. Of the 3,608 papers published from 2000 to 2010 and cited more than 500 times, 603 (14%) were from the UK. Of the 717 papers cited more than 1,000 times in the same period, 142 (20%) were from the UK.

Source: Thomson Reuters