British science in the 1980s — Has the relative decline continued?

The paper concludes that, although a few isolated indicators might be taken to suggest that British science has been growing in some absolute sense, the great weight of evidence points to a continuing relative decline.

Abstract

In previous articles, the author and his colleagues have shown that British science declined relative to other countries during the 1970 and more slowly during the early 1980s. More recently, the author examined figures for 1981–85 produced by the Information Science and Scientometrics Research Unit (ISSRU) and showed that they were consistent with other evidence on Britain's relative decline. However, those latter findings and the methodology used to derive them have been criticised byBraun and his colleagues at ISSRU, and byLeydesdorff andKealey. This paper begins by examining these criticisms to establish whether there are any grounds for revising the previous conclusion that British science has been slipping in relation to other countries. It then analyses the latest publication and citation statistics. It also presents new data on highly cited papers and on the national distribution of Nobel Prizes. The paper concludes that, although a few isolated indicators might be taken to suggest that British science has been growing in some absolute sense, the great weight of evidence points to a continuing relative decline.