The global state of science

By law, the National Science Foundation is required to do a biennial evaluation of the state of science research and innovation. This is one of the years it’s due, and the NSF has gotten its Science and Engineering Indicators report ready for delivery to Congress and the president. The report is generally optimistic, finding significant funding for science and a strong return on that investment in terms of jobs and industries. But it does highlight how the global focus is shifting, with China and South Korea making massive investments in research and technology.

Science isn’t a monolithic endeavor, so there’s no way to create a single measure that captures global scientific progress. Instead, the NSF looked at 42 different indicators that track things like research funding, business investments, training of scientists, and more. All of these measures were evaluated for the globe, in order to put the US’ scientific activity in perspective.

Show me the money

Overall, science funding is on a good trajectory. In 2005, global R&D spending was just under a trillion dollars; by 2015, it had cleared $2 trillion. In total, 75 percent of that is spent in 10 nations; in order of spending, these are the United States, China, Japan, Germany, South Korea, France, India, and the United Kingdom. The US alone spends about $500 billion. China, which was at roughly $100 billion a decade ago, has now cleared $400 billion.

That growth is gradually shifting the focus of global science. At the start of this century, Europe and North America accounted for 65 percent of the global R&D spending. They’re now down to less than half.

Within the US, business spent the most on research, but it was largely on applied research and product development. When it comes to studying fundamental science, business only accounts for about a quarter of the spending. Universities, private charities, and the federal government combine to cover the rest; this sort of fundamental research only receives 17 percent of the US spending, though. All sources of science funding have been flat or declining for the last five years.

Within federal spending, a bit over half goes out for defense-related issues, primarily for product development. Half of what’s left is spent on health research, which is heavily biased toward basic research.

When it comes to maintaining a population that’s ready to do science, things are a bit mixed. The relevant test scores for US students are improving a bit, but they remain nothing to write home about—a bit better than the international average in science, a bit worse in math.

College-level degrees in math and science remain about a third of the total bachelor’s degrees awarded in the US. The number of these degrees awarded has climbed by 250,000 to 800,000 over the course of this century. That leaves the US as awarding the same number as the eight largest EU nations. China, by contrast, has seen the number of science degrees awarded climb from under 400,000 to over 1.6 million. India and China combined now account for roughly half the world’s undergraduate degrees in the sciences.

For doctoral degrees, China’s rise has been a bit slower. Here, the top eight nations in the EU have a commanding lead, awarding about 60,000 science doctoral degrees annually. The US remains the single largest granter of doctoral degrees, at about 40,000; over a third of those went to foreign students. While China has seen lots of growth, it leveled off somewhat once that nation hit 30,000 degrees. PhDs are critical both for the basic research that fuels business and technology innovations (as we’ll see just below) and for providing a workforce that’s able to take that research and develop applications for it.

Putting it to use

What are we getting with all those students and money? A standard measure of research activity is the number of publications that result. Here, the money appears to correlate with the results, as the US and China produce the most publications. The EU edges ahead of China in biomedical research publications, which is the single largest area of research by this measure. While there have been some questions about the quality of some of China’s research, its researchers are producing a growing number of the most highly cited papers. (Oddly, Switzerland has led in this category by a wide margin.)

China’s growth is also apparent in what the NSF terms “knowledge intensive services,” which includes things like financial data analysis and storing digital health records. Here, China has passed Japan for third place, and it’s closing in on the EU, where this segment has remained stagnant for roughly a decade (it’s growing in the US, which remains on top). China has passed both the EU and Japan when it comes to high-tech manufacturing.

Another measure of research productivity used by the NSF is the successful transfer of knowledge into the market. The lack of global information here focused this analysis on data from the US. US patents show that the fundamental research that is done at academic institutions remains the main driver of patents. A large majority (typically 60 to 70 percent) of the information cited in patents in all fields originated in academic research. Patents that originated directly in academic research institutions have also shot up in the most recent five-year period for which data is available.

The report notes that the federal government also transfers technologies directly to industry. The Department of Energy is the largest source of this tech transfer, followed by Defense and NASA.

Public attitudes

Developing and maintaining the education of scientists and a robust research program requires significant public support. In the US, this is reflected by the fact that 40 percent of the public expresses a great deal of confidence in the research community, a number surpassed only by the military. Large majorities—85 to 95 percent—agree that scientists want to help humanity and are helping to solve problems, numbers that haven’t changed much at all this century. More than 80 percent feel the federal government should continue to fund fundamental scientific research.

That said, the report highlights that the public and scientific community don’t always agree. Only slightly above half rated themselves as very concerned about climate change, a topic that worries most scientists. That’s almost identical to the number who felt that way about nuclear power, which many scientists accept as a partial solution to climate change. Most scientists regard genetically modified foods as safe, but more than 40 percent of the public is worried about them, a number that has shot up from 25 percent in 2010. So while there is a lot of respect for scientists, the public either remains unaware of or disagrees with some of their informed opinions.