May 7, 2008

An interesting map - nation size v/s peer-reviewed science papers

Derek Lowe and one of his readers compiled a map of the world. From Derek:
Science By Country
I’d like to see a map of the world with country size dependent on the number of scientific publications and patents – perhaps you’d want to use publications per capita, or per educated capita. That's a cartogram, and although there are plenty of interesting ones on the web, I haven't found that one yet. The US would loom large, that’s for sure. Japan might be the most oversized compared to its geography, although Singapore would also be a lot easier to pick out. Western Europe would expand to fill up a lot of space, with Germany, England, and France (among others) taking up proportionally more room inside the region and (perhaps) Spain and Portugal taking up somewhat less. Switzerland would swell dramatically.
This map can be found at Worldmapper:
worldmapper_science_publications.jpg
A big version in PDF format can be downloaded from here. Derek has this observation:
Another region that would basically disappear would be the Middle East and most of the rest of the Islamic world. Iran would hang in there, smaller but recognizable, and you’d be able to find Pakistan, too. But the Arab countries (with the minor exception of Egypt) would nearly vanish. The figures from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (the multinational group involved) show that from 1995-2005, the Islamic countries contributed 2.5% of all the peer-reviewed scientific papers. That’s all the more interesting when you consider the amount of potential funding that washes around that part of the world.
Very true -- the people in the Middle East need to get their heads out of the sand and wake up to the fact that this is 2008 and the world is eclipsing them faster and faster. Only their oil money is keeping them from being primitive nomadic tribesmen and their oil is a finite resource... Posted by DaveH at May 7, 2008 6:31 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?