Roll up the map!

Science|Business Managing Editor Peter Wrobel

The trouble is, in many areas of research it already has. While analysts have been focusing on investment in R&D, actual research output has been missing from their radar screens. They need to refocus. Asia’s not just coming, it’s already here.

That’s one conclusion from a set of figures made public this week by David Swinbanks, CEO of the Nature Publishing Group’s Asia-Pacific arm, at its Asia Pacific Forum meeting thousands of miles from Europe and the US – in Tokyo, to be precise.

Another revelation, this time from a survey: that Western scientists by and large have never even heard of the institutions that are responsible for the eastern surge.

Now, Nature Publishing Group makes its living out of the output end of research funding, through publishing papers. It has an interest in finding out where its next meal is coming from. And so it has been digging around, and has given Science|Business a look at the stats it has come up with.

In the overtaking lane

One of its publishers, Jason Wilde, has been looking into the big database of academic papers run by Thomson ISI, the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. ISI adds around a million papers to its database each year – and on current performance the Asia–Pacific region will overtake not just Europe but the US in sheer numbers of papers, covering all disciplines, within four years. And the number of high-quality papers is increasing almost exponentially.

China’s output alone is now approaching that of Japan and China. And that is before the massive investment of recent years noted by the European Commission, among others, has fully fed through into research papers.

The Eastern strength is most apparent in the physical sciences. Judged by numbers of papers, the Asia-Pacific region has led the world in materials science for many years, taken the lead in photonics, dominates in nanotechnology, and equals or surpasses the United States in physics, chemistry and engineering.

Harvard, MIT, and the Max Planck Institutes are well known global brands. Not so the eastern institutes. While 62 per cent of the 1,500 global respondents to a survey of nature.com registrants knew about EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organisation, only 3 per cent said they knew about A-IMBN, the Asian equivalent and only 19 per cent had heard of Tokyo Tech. Even the name of Japan’s giant RIKEN, with thousands of researchers working across the scientific spectrum, a Nobel prize and a collaboration with MIT, only jogged the memory of 32 per cent.

While the West has slept, the map of global research has been redrawn. Europe needs to beef up its research programmes, obviously. But world science has changed. What Europe needs to do most of all – and Demos hits the nail right on the head – is find out what’s going on out East, network, make links, and set up collaborations.

If you can’t beat them, join them.