Singapore tops Japan in cited research

The Yomiuri Shimbun

The frequency that Japanese scientific research papers were cited in the last five years was lower than the world average, slipping to the second place in Asia after Singapore, a science and technology information company said.

Thomson Reuters surveyed the number of times research papers were cited or carried in 11,000 international scientific journals. Results were released Tuesday.

The number of papers from Japan in 2009 was 78,500, which was 6.75 percent of the world's total. While other Asian countries are publishing an increasing amount of scientific research, Japan's share dropped 2.7 percentage points from 2000.

The rate of citation for research papers from Japan was 0.98, compared with the world average of 1. Among Asian nations, Singapore had the top spot with 1.01, replacing Japan. Only 0.7 percent of Japanese articles ranked in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers, while the United States and Britain both boasted 1.8 percent.

However, in its traditionally strong fields of physics and pharmacology, Japan had more than 10 percent of the world total. In the fields of space studies, immunology and physics, more than 10 percent of the top 1 percent of most-cited papers came from Japan.