Yes, England has finally won something. After a poor showing in the 2010 World Cup, the Eurovision Song Contest, and the global economic crisis, we're officially #1 in neuroscience. Which clearly is the most important measure of a nation's success.According to data collated by ScienceWatch.com and released recently, each English neuroscience paper from the past 10 years has been cited, on average, 24.53 times, making us the most cited country in the world relative to the total number of papers published (source here). We're second only to the USA in terms of overall citations.
(In this table, "Rank" refers to total number of citations).Why is this? I suspect it owes a lot to the fact that England has produced many of the technical papers which everyone refers to (although few people have ever read). Take the paper Dynamic Causal Modelling by Karl Friston et al from London. It's been cited 649 times since 2003, because it's the standard reference for the increasingly popular fMRI technique of the same name.
Or take Ashburner and Friston's Voxel-Based Morphometry—The Methods, cited over 2000 times in the past 10 years, which introduced a method for measuring the size of different brain regions. Or take...most of Karl Friston's papers, actually. He's the single biggest contributor to the way in which modern neuroimaging is done.
7 comments:
That's reassuring. I wonder what the proportion of those publications are based in America.. I think America receives 30 times more funding towards research than all the countries in the world put together so if you factor in that then England is probably leading. That wouldn't surprise me, given the English system is considered more "academic".
I can't help suspecting it's slightly silly to allege superiority over the USA on the basis of comparing an average of all US states, with the average for the UK.
Presumably some US states might come out higher than the UK.
If it gave an average score for the EU including the UK, it looks like that would come out lower than the average for the US. Though unfortunately the link from the original article to its data source seems to be broken.
oh yeah it's not even a UK average is it, looks like it would be lower than USA if it was
and i suppose you probably can't break down the USA stats by state but theoretically anyway
God the brain sure is an UGLY looking organ! It looks like a shriveled up scrotum! YUCK.
Charming.
DNA it isn't silly. Superpowers are supposed to be investing in research. A country's intellectual capacity counts because at times they use such knowledge for diplomacy or war. Look at Einstein, imagine if he didn't write that letter to the American president, transferred from Germany. Part of Germany's downfall was due to a braindrain.
It's supposed to be harder to excel academically in an English than an American institution.
DNA: Yeah, it's dangerous to take these things too seriously, especially when the USA is involved because as you say there are lots of different states. It's probably more reasonable as a way of comparing within Europe though.
anonymous: It's even worse than it looks on that picture. It's less colorful. also it is slimy.
Please edit your list to include cricket.
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