I wasn't talking about Europe. But let's consider. What type of graph is it? Is it in ratio or is it absolute?

If it it is absolute - Europe has nearly double the population of America.

If it is in ratio - what were the comparative starting points?

Furthermore - how is he measuring the research growth? Just by the number of papers? What about the paper quality? What about impact? Are there duplications in translation? Are Europeans optimising for "publish" over Americans? What is really going on - nothing is explained about the statistics - and anytime that happens - I call bullshit - even on Tyson (no one is sacred).

Furthermore America has - and continues to be - the biggest spender on science the world has ever seen. Stating that they aren't "growing" as fast as everyone else is a false statement - they are already the largest by a wide margin (growth constrained by GDP).

It looks like Tyson is tweaking statistics to make a point - which feels very underhanded - but it's for a good cause at the very least.

More here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/2012/08/22/...

> China could overtake the U.S. in the output of science publications as early as 2013 based on a simple linear extrapolation of current publication levels and rates of increase.

While this trend is noteworthy, the value of global science research relates more closely to the quality than the quantity of scientific publications. The quality of science research is challenging to measure and may only be known many years after research becomes available to the scientific community. One popular, albeit rough, measure of quality is the number of times one scientific research article is cited by other articles.

The research contributions of the U.S. and China are most affected by evaluating scientific publications by citations rather than article volume. During the period 2004-2008, U.S. science research accounted for 30 percent of global article citations, even though the U.S. only contributed 21 percent of article publications, as shown in the chart above. China accounted for just 4 percent of article citations, despite contributing 10 percent of article publications.

Source: http://www.globalsherpa.org/research-science-technology-inte...

> Global science publication authorship –

USA - 21%

China – 10%

Japan – 6%

Number of Patents per year -

USA – 121179

China – 3303

Japan – 46978

2011 Research and development spending in billions, US dollars

USA – 405

China - 153

Japan - 144

Sources:

Attribution: http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/282676/detail/

Number of patents year; 2010 USPTO: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/cst_all.htm

Royal Society Global Science authorship: http://www.globalsherpa.org/research-science-technology-inte...

Spending: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_a...

> Measuring growth only is what screwed up the world economy. I doubt that it’s very helpful in science.
Any country that had zero scientific research before 1990 and has a bit now, will score high on the growth map. Whereas a country already doing well research-wise will eventually hit the ceiling and won’t be able to grow anymore.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/neil_degrasse_tyson_on_th...