Pursuing Scientific Excellence

IS U.S. SCIENCE LOSING ITS COMPETItive edge? The New York Times addressed this question a few weeks ago in a long, page-one article by veteran science correspondent William J. Broad. Drawing from a number of sources, Broad concluded that many nations, particularly in Western Europe and Asia, are catching up with and in some cases even surpassing the U.S. in various measures of scientific and technological accomplishment. The U.S. no longer dominates the world as it once did in the number of scientific papers published, patents awarded, or Ph.D.s conferred. C&EN has been covering these trends for many years. In this week's issue, Editor-at-Large Michael Heylin looks in some depth at one component of this question, the nation of origin of scientific papers over the past 15 years (see page 38). He finds that, while the long-standing scientific dominance of the U.S. persists, other areas of the world are ...