Editorial: Vol. 72, Number 3 (2007)

Recently Grady Chism, Scientific Editor of IFT's Journal of Food Science Education, sent me a link to information on scientific publications that was generated by the National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/toc.htm). These data illustrate the growth in communications and help us realize the stiff competition that JFS, JFSE, and CRFSFS are facing in the world of communication. Illustrative data include the following: The worldwide S&E publications output captured in Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index grew from approximately 466,000 articles in 1988 to nearly 700,000 in 2003, an increase of 50%. This growth was a result of more articles published per journal and an increase in the number of journals covered by these 2 databases. Worldwide growth in article output between 1988 and 2003 was strongest in the European Union-15 (EU), Japan, and the East Asia-4 (China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). The EU-15 share of world output surpassed that of the United States in 1998, although growth in the EU-15 and also in Japan slowed starting in the mid-1990s. The article output of the East Asia-4 grew more than sevenfold during this period, resulting in its share of world output rising from less than 2% to 8%. The number of U.S. scientific publications remained essentially flat between 1992 and 2003, causing the U.S. share of world article output to decline from 38% to 30% between 1988 and 2003. The flattening of U.S. output—199,864 articles in 1992; 211,233 articles in 2003—in the face of continuing growth of research inputs represents a trend change from several decades' growth in number of U.S. publications. The share of publications with authors from multiple countries—an indicator of international collaboration and the globalization of science—grew worldwide and for most countries between 1988 and 2003. In 2003, 20% of all articles had at least one foreign author, up from 8% in 1988. The increase in international collaboration reflects intensified collaboration among the United States, EU-15, and Japan. It also reflects greater collaboration between these S&E publishing regions and developing countries and an emerging zone of intraregional collaboration centered in East Asia. The share of internationally coauthored articles at least doubled in the United States, the EU-15, and Japan. A pattern of intraregional collaboration emerged in East Asia in the mid-1990s centered in Japan and, increasingly, in China. The United States has the largest share of all internationally authored papers of any single country, and its researchers collaborate with counterparts in more countries than do the researchers of any other country. U.S.-based authors were represented in 44% of all internationally coauthored articles in 2003 and collaborated with authors in 172 of the 192 countries that had any internationally coauthored articles in 2003. U.S. collaboration with the rest of the world continues to increase, but its relative share of coauthorship on other countries' internationally authored articles has declined as those countries have broadened their international ties. As measured by the share of collaborative articles, both intra-institutional collaboration of U.S. sectors and collaboration of these sectors with the rest of the world have increased significantly. The share of U.S. academic articles with at least one non-U.S. address grew from 10% to 24% between 1988 and 2003. The share of U.S. academic articles with nonacademic U.S. authors increased by 6 percentage points during this period, to 30%. The volume of citations to S&E literature grew more than 60% between 1992 and 2003. The growth in citations was the greatest in the same S&E publishing regions that fueled growth of S&E publications: the EU-15, Japan, and the East Asia-4. The volume of citations to U.S. literature, however, flattened in the late 1990s. The increase in citation volume in most regions coincided with a growing share of citations to work done outside the author's country, reflecting the growing ease of access to worldwide scientific literature. Citations to literature produced outside the author's home country rose from 42% of all citations in 1992 to 48% in 2003. The number of scientific articles cited by U.S. patents, an indicator of the linkage between science and technology, rose rapidly until the late 1990s. These increases were heavily centered in academic-authored articles in the fields of biomedical research and clinical medicine.