"American Universities Are Being Overtaken."
Not so fast. There's no question that the growing research aspirations of emerging countries have eroded the long-standing dominance of North America, the European Union, and Japan. Asia's share of the world's research and development spending grew from 27 to 32 percent from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea, according to a 2010 UNESCO report. The traditional research leaders saw decreases during the same period. From 2002 to 2008, the U.S. proportion of articles in the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index, the authoritative database of research publications, fell further than any other country's, from 30.9 to 27.7 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese publications recorded in the same index more than doubled, as did the volume of scientific papers from Brazil, a country whose research institutions wouldn't have been on anyone's radar 20 years ago.
This shift in the geography of knowledge production is certainly noteworthy, but as with the international study market, the United States simply represents a proportionally smaller piece of a greatly expanded pie. R&D spending worldwide massively surged in the last decade, from $790 billion to $1.1 trillion, up 45 percent. And the declining U.S. share of global research spending still represented a healthy increase in constant dollars, from $277 billion in 2002 to $373 billion in 2007. U.S. research spending as a percentage of GDP over the same period was consistent and very high by global standards. The country's R&D investments still totaled more than all Asian countries' combined.
Similarly, a declining U.S. share of the world's scientific publications may sound bad from an American point of view. But the total number of publications listed in the Thomson Reuters index surged by more than a third from 2002 to 2008. Even with a shrinking global lead, U.S. researchers published 46,000 more scientific articles in 2008 than they did six years earlier. And in any case, research discoveries don't remain within the borders of the countries where they occur -- knowledge is a public good, with little regard for national boundaries. Discoveries in one country's research institutions can be capitalized on by innovators elsewhere. Countries shouldn't be indifferent to the rise in their share of the research -- big breakthroughs can have positive economic and academic spillover effects -- but they also shouldn't fear the increase of cutting-edge discoveries elsewhere.
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