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The Prime Minister in his 2002 speech to the Royal Society, “Science Matters”, highlighted the importance of maintaining and improving the UK’s relative international performance in scientific research. This is reflected in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills PSA target.
To assess this improvement the consultancy firm Evidence Ltd, commissioned by DIUS, defined a set of indicators and developed a series of metrics, which are described in the reports “International comparative performance of the UK Research Base ”.
The report includes data from such sources as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Eurostat, the UN, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), Thomson Scientific and the statistics portals of individual national governments.
The latest report (July 2008) is now available. This confirms the UK’s strong relative international performance in terms of achievement, productivity and efficiency.
In July 2004 Sir David King published "The Scientific Impact of Nations" in the journal Nature (ref: D A King, Nature 430 (2004) 311-316 (15 July 2004).
The paper analyses the outcomes and outputs from scientific investment in order to measure the quality of research in an international context. Key points from the paper include:
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