Scotland's world share of science and social-science papers over a recent
five-year period, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 22 fields
in the
Thomson
Scientific database. Also, Scotland's citation impact compared
to the world average in each field, in percentage terms.
Field
Percentage of papers
from Scotland
Relative impact
compared to world
Space Science
2.30
+78
Plant & Animal Sciences
1.98
+38
Microbiology
1.91
+31
Molecular Biology & Genetics
1.86
+36
Social Sciences
1.64
+1
Education
1.60
-12
Ecology/Environmental
1.55
+44
Geosciences
1.50
+9
Biology & Biochemistry
1.50
+26
Immunology
1.38
+1
Economics & Business
1.31
-3
Psychology/Psychiatry
1.26
+15
Neurosciences & Behavior
1.24
+1
Clinical Medicine
1.22
+38
Scotland's overall percent share, all fields:
1.16
Agricultural Sciences
0.96
+70
Pharmacology
0.90
+71
Mathematics
0.90
+31
Engineering
0.83
+8
Physics
0.81
+65
Chemistry
0.74
+8
Computer Science
0.68
+14
Materials Science
0.43
+17
Between 2002 and 2006,
Thomson
Scientific indexed 47,206 papers that listed at least one author
address in Scotland. Of those papers, the highest percentage appeared in
journals classified under the heading of space science, followed by plant
& animal sciences and microbiology. In space science, as the right-hand
column shows, the citations-per-paper average of research from Scotland
exceeded the world average by 78% (13.41 cites per paper for Scotland
versus the world baseline of 7.53 cites). The relative impact of papers
from Scotland-based authors was also notably high in pharmacology (71%
above the world average), agricultural sciences (70% above), physics
(+65%), and ecology/environmental sciences (+44%).