Publishing Counts

On April 26, 2011, we searched the term “biotechnology” on PubMed.gov, and it returned 133,531 articles. That’s just the tip of the biotech-article iceberg, though, because many biotechnology-related articles would not necessarily include this search term. Moreover, many articles that are relevant to biotech R&D come from other fields, including chemistry, information science and so on. The simple point is: Biotechnology generates thousands of articles every year. For a country to develop a reputation as a leader in biotechnology, it must publish many good papers—the emphasis being on good.

To get a sense of which countries publish the most papers, we present data from Wayne Peng (Nature Biotechnology. 2010. Trends in biotech literature 2009. 28(9):887). The results show that China published the most biotechnology papers in 2009, with a total of 3,313. That’s more than 50 percent more than were published in the U.S., which generated 2,114. Several other Asian countries also published extensively in biotechnology, with South Korea, India and Japan generating 1,713, 1,217 and 1,051 papers, respectively. In Europe, Germany emerged as the leading biotech-paper publisher, with 949, but that figure is less than 30 percent of the papers published by researchers in China. Italy, with 542 papers, came in second after Germany.

Some of the top scorers in overall innovation did not publish many papers. Denmark, for example, came in 14th, with 183 papers. Perhaps more surprising, Sweden did not even make it on to this biotech-paper list.

But simply publishing lots of biotechnology papers does not make a country a leader in research. To assess the value of research papers, scientists often rely on how often they get cited. From the U.S. National Science Foundation Science and Engineering Indicators 2010, we provide data on the regions responsible for the world’s share of the top 10 percent of cited papers. The data show that, although the U.S. did not publish the most papers, the ones that it did publish were more likely to get cited. In fact, papers from the U.S. account for nearly 14 percent of the top 10 percent of cited papers. In contrast, all of the European Union only accounts for 9.33 percent, and a collection of 10 Asian countries only accounts for about 6 percent of the top 10 percent of published papers.

The citation data suggest that the thousands of articles from China, for example, do not earn enough readership or respect to be cited as often as papers from other parts of the world. Moreover, these data indicate that research from the U.S. garners the most attention. In fact, articles published by researchers from the U.S. get cited far more than those from any other country. This respect goes a long way in driving a powerful biotechnology industry. Moreover, publishing papers that get cited in influential journals also provides more exposure in other countries. Overall, strong research on relevant topics in biotechnology—or any other branch of science—gets cited the most and in the best places.