Korean universities not publishing as much scientific research as "global peers."

The KT article's title is "Korean Universities Lag Global Peers in Publication of Papers," which sounds a little pessimistic. South Korea did rank 12th in number of papers, not too bad considering its population, and not too far off its economic strength. Ranking 30th in frequency of citation is more alarming, though, a placement I suspect comes in large part from its reputation for academic dishonesty. My brother was talking about his job prospects after grad school and I joked that he could work in South Korea with his Ph.D. in Pharmacology, and his first comment was about how Korean scientists are always in the news for fabricating their studies. Anyway, an excerpt from the article:

Korea ranked 12th in the number of papers published in a global reference index among 180 countries in 2007, one notch up from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. A total of 25,494 Korean papers were posted on the Science Citation Index (SCI) of the National Science Indicator database. The SCI, a citation index owned by Thomson Reuters, covers the world’s leading journals of science and technology.

South Korea's ranking in frequency of citation, however, fell by two notches to 30th place, the ministry said. Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands had less SCI references than Korea, however, their theses were cited more frequently in other papers.

``It means the quality of growth in universities remains slow despite quantitative development. We will focus on supporting universities to produce higher quality papers,’’ a ministry official said.

The United States topped the ranking with 293,371 papers, followed by the U.K, China, Germany, Japan and France. Korean scientists published a total of 25,494 theses on SCI last year, compared with 23,297 a year earlier. Korea took up 2.17 percent of all SCI papers, a two-fold growth from a decade ago.

Some in these fields are already working on a solution to close the production gap. Not really on-topic, but I thought I read something about this in relation to Korea elsewhere, but it was actually more about China, US, and educational priorities, and was from The World Is Flat. An excerpt from page 269:

According to the National Science Board, the percentage of scientific papers written by Americans has fallen 10 percent since 1992. The percentage of American papers published in the top physics journal, Physics Review, has fallen from 61 percent to 29 percent since 1983. And now we are starting to see a surge in patents awarded to Asian countries. From 1980 to 2003, Japan's share of world industrial patents rose from 12 percent to 21 percent, and Taiwan's from 0 percent to 3 percent. By contrast, the U.S. share of patents has fallen from 60 percent to 52 percent since 1980.

On the same page a quotation from David Greenberg, former news editor of Science journal, from the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004, which shines a little light on the numbers:

To put scientific publishing trends in context . . . it's important to look not only at overall percentiles but also at the actual numbers of published papers. At first, it may sound startling to hear that China has quadrupled its scientific publication rate between 1986 and 1999. But it sounds somewhat less startling if one realizes that the actual number of Chinese papers published rose from 2,911 to 11,675. By comparison, close to a third of all the world's scientific papers were published by Americans---163,526 out of 528,643. In other words, China, a nation with almost four times the population of the United States, published (as of 1999) only one-fourteenth as many scientific papers as the United States.

Anyway, the ranking of 12th shows room for improvement, but I don't think it should be anything to cry about.