Assessing assessments of British science. Some facts and figures to accept or decline

Conclusions

After a rather comprehensive analysis of severalSCI based publication productivity indicators, it can be concluded that neither the view of a “continuing decline”⁵ nor that of a “remarkable increase”⁶ of British science in the first half of the eighties can be supported by valid bibliometric/scientometric arguments. The annual changes of any of the indicators considered had no statistical significance, and no trend distinguishable from the effect of random fluctuations could be observed. Some of the indicators showed a local minimum in 1982, the significance of which can be clarified only in the frame of a longer range study.

All the abovementioned refers to British science in general. As a previous paper⁵ reported also a decline of British publication performance in some science fields and subfields these would have to be investigated one by one with the above described methodology. The present authors did investigate the research performance of British analytical chemistry which has been mentioned as a declining subfield.⁵ Our results however showed¹² that analytical chemistry is a flourishing subfield in Britain.

Finaly we mention thatNederhof in a recent study on the performance of six industrial nations in the field of biotechnology insisted that his “findings contradict earlier reports⁴ showing UK losses in article productivity in basic research”.¹³