Section Menu

Relative International Performance of the UK Research Base

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 of Trade and Industry's PSA target: “to improve the relative international performance of the UK’s science and engineering base”. 

To assess this improvement the consultancy firm Evidence Ltd, commissioned by OSI, defined a set of indicators and developed a series of metrics, which are described in the reports “PSA target metrics for 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), the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the statistics portals of individual national governments.

The latest report is available under related documents. 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. A couple of the key points from the paper are:

• UK is punching well above its weight - second only to the United States on most of the measures
• UK gives excellent value for money from its research budget - we are number one in the G8 on efficiency measures.