Page:Finch Group report.pdf/22

 tend to be the major funders of the basic and applied research that results in such findings; and they have increased—or at least sought to protect—their budgets for investment in research because they see such investment as an essential underpinning for a successful modern economy and society. In the US, for example, the Federal budget for basic research increased by 28% in real terms between 2000 and 2009, including the stimulus provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

3.6. The result has been a sustained increase in the amount of research being undertaken, and in the outputs of that research. The number of articles published in journals has been growing in recent years at nearly 4% a year, so that in 2010 over 1.9 million articles were published, alongside an unknown number of research reports, conference presentations, working papers and so on. Although expenditure on research has been constrained in some countries since the financial crisis of 2008, there is no sign that the rates of increase in global research publications will fall in the foreseeable future.

3.7. Globalisation. Within the context of these increases in research activity and outputs, there have been dramatic shifts in the global research landscape in recent years. Strong economic growth in countries such as Brazil, China and India has driven large increases in investment in R&D, which have in turn brought huge rises in the volume of research outputs. Between 2006 and 2010, the annual growth rate in articles with authors from Brazil was 9.8%, from China 12.3%, and from India 13.7%. Chinese authors accounted for 17.1% of the global total of articles published in 2010, and they are now second only to researchers in the USA in the number of articles published. Some countries starting from a lower base have seen even higher rates of growth: for Iran it was 25.2% between 2006 and 2010, for Malaysia 35.4%.

3.8. This global shift in the production of research outputs has been accompanied by a rise in international collaboration among researchers. Research is increasingly being undertaken in a distributed way that blurs the distinctions between countries, making it more and more difficult to attribute research inputs and outputs unequivocally to specific countries. But collaborations are increasingly focused in a core of countries (including the UK) which collaborate with each other as well as with others in the periphery: collaborations in the periphery itself are relatively rare.