Science without walls

雑誌Natureの最新号では、国際的に門戸を開いた研究が引用を生む優れた結果を生み出しているという考察をそれぞれ切り口は違いますが2つ紹介していました。これはトランプ政権の入国制限やイギリスのEU脱退の影響を意識していて、社説のタイトルもScience without wallsとトランプの政策を念頭に置いていますね。

 

Science without walls is good forall

International mobility and collaboration are linked to stronger research.

04 October 2017

 

This week, Nature’s Comment section publishes two bibliometric analyses that suggest international mobility has similar science-boosting effects.

The first finds that researchers build strong links between nations as they travel around the world. The authors track 16 million individuals who published papers in 2008–15. Only about 4% of these people changed countries, but those who did had 40% higher average citation rates than those publishing solely in one region, a trend that held true across 13 regions. Importantly, mobile scientists retained ties in the countries they left.

 

The second argues that countries with mobile scientific workforces produce papers that are more highly cited. (These are the same countries that have the greatest fraction of internationally authored papers.) The analysis shows that a nation’s willingness to let scientists cross borders was a better predictor of highly cited papers than was the proportion of its gross domestic product that it spent on research.

 

2番目の研究によると日本は閉鎖的な国で、引用されるような影響力のある論文をそれほどかけておらず、しかも2000年のレベルで停滞しておるとあります。

Open countries have strong science

Caroline S. Wagner& Koen Jonkers

04 October 2017

Caroline S. Wagner and Koen Jonkers find a clear correlation between a nation's scientific influence and the links it fosters with foreign researchers.

 

 Countries that are highly 'open' and that produce high-impact research seem to benefit from participating in international collaboration. This is seen in the higher impact of smaller nations, which cluster in the top-right quadrant of the graphic (see 'Open countries have impact'). Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark all scored highly on this measure as well as on citations. The correlation between openness and citation impact was tight (r2 = 0.7 according to a regression analysis) regardless of R&D spending or numbers of articles published.

 

Countries with low openness and low impact include Russia, Turkey and Poland, China, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and, against expectations, South Korea (which spends a higher percentage of its GDP on R&D than almost every country, including the United States) These countries are shown in the lower-left quadrant.

 

（中略）

 

In Japan, especially, output and citation impacts have remained flat since 2000. Japan is also among the least internationalized of leading nations, and this could be dragging on its performance. Lack of professional mobility, as well as language barriers, may be hindering engagement.

 

カズオ・イシグロの受賞で「日本人すげえ」の人が勢いづいていますが、日本の将来はどうなるのか心配になります。でも「日本人すげえ」の人たちはこのような研究を読んでもSouth Korea (which spends a higher percentage of its GDP on R&D than almost every country, including the United States)のあたりを喜んで「ざまあ」と言っておしまいなんでしょうか。。。