Irish science: and endangered species.

Dan_Solo

I went to Pubmed and searched for "ireland [pl] 2010" and a few previous years.

2005: 19561
2006: 45385
2007: 28767
2008: 26168
2009: 28248
2010: 18949

That's a drop in publications of 33% in 1 year, and I expect things to be at least as bad in 2011.
Time to admit that the "knowledge economy" is no more than a tired soundbite.

cavedave

What happened 2005-2006-2007?

There was a huge change over these times.

How do our numbers compare with other countries? As in is the trend generally rising or have other experienced a drop off as well?

cianl1

Dan_Solo wrote: »

I went to Pubmed and searched for "ireland [pl] 2010" and a few previous years.

2005: 19561
2006: 45385
2007: 28767
2008: 26168
2009: 28248
2010: 18949

That's a drop in publications of 33% in 1 year, and I expect things to be at least as bad in 2011.
Time to admit that the "knowledge economy" is no more than a tired soundbite.

PubMed is not the be all and end all of scientific publishing. I would hazard a guess (and a good one at that, I reckon) that not every paper published by an Irish post-graduate/post-doctoral student/researcher makes it onto the list immediately. Also, I can't imagine every journal in the entire world is covered by PubMed either.

Since you're focusing on just two years from the list provided then allow me to do the same:

2005: 19561
2006: 45385

A 56.9% increase, and who's to say it won't happen again. There could be any number of reasons for the drop, such as not having strong-enough results to publish or the Journal themselves rejecting papers on ridiculous grounds such as "too field specific" (JACS are notorious for that) and hence delaying publication.

You want accurate figures? Then go to each of the journals websites, individually (e.g. JACS, Angewandte Chemie, etc.), and take the numbers from there then tot them up yourself.

Otherwise, stop f*cking whinging over nothing and let us get back to work.

EDIT: You also misspelled your thread title.

Dan_Solo

cianl1 wrote: »

PubMed is not the be all and end all of scientific publishing. I would hazard a guess (and a good one at that, I reckon) that not every paper published by an Irish post-graduate/post-doctoral student/researcher makes it onto the list immediately. Also, I can't imagine every journal in the entire world is covered by PubMed either

That's a lot of guesses you're hazarding there buddy. Why don't you do some pre-spout research? Whether *all* science publications are there it is quite easily large enough to be representative.
Oh, and it isn't worth publishing in science or medical journals if they're not in Pubmed. Simple fact.

cianl1 wrote: »

Since you're focusing on just two years from the list provided then allow me to do the same:

2005: 19561
2006: 45385

A 56.9% increase, and who's to say it won't happen again. There could be any number of reasons for the drop, such as not having strong-enough results to publish or the Journal themselves rejecting papers on ridiculous grounds such as "too field specific" (JACS are notorious for that) and hence delaying publication.

You're obviously new to science, so I trust I'll only have to say this once so you don't embarrass yourself *every* time you fail to make a useful post to a science forum: anecdotes and examples are not evidence.
The sample size here is fairly large you might have noticed, probably enough to iron out a flock of sheep being eaten by a stray hyena half way through a study you'd imagine.

cianl1 wrote: »

You want accurate figures? Then go to each of the journals websites, individually (e.g. JACS, Angewandte Chemie, etc.), and take the numbers from there then tot them up yourself.

Er, no. It's pretty obvious you don't even know what Pubmed is. Learn and return.

cianl1 wrote: »

Otherwise, stop f*cking whinging over nothing and let us get back to work.

You're posting uninformed tripe on the web. Unless that's your day job, then I'm not really keeping you, am I?

cianl1 wrote: »

EDIT: You also misspelled your thread title.

Wow, somebody hasn't been on the internet before and thinks spelling corrections don't make them look an utter d1ckhead.

darjeeling

Unfortunately - or perhaps happily - the figures quoted aren't correct, for two reasons.

1:

PubMed wrote:

Place of Publication [PL]

This field indicates the cited journal's country of publication. (link)

Many scientists here publish in non-Irish journals too, and these papers aren't included in a search for 'Ireland[PL]'.

2: To get papers published in a particular year, you need to use the [DP] (date of publication) tag. The searches in the opening post didn't use this, and in fact each return numbers of papers from across many years.

Searching for papers in Irish and French journals from 2005-2010 gives:

[B]Year  France  Ireland[/B]
2005  12470   10911  
2006  12946   11580  
2007  12597   10827  
2008  13826   11237  
2009  13610   11604  
2010  12197   10549

The drop in both countries for 2010 may well reflect a delay in indexing - some papers don't seem to get listed correctly for a while.

Dan_Solo

darjeeling wrote: »

The drop in both countries for 2010 may well reflect a delay in indexing - some papers don't seem to get listed correctly for a while.

Let's hope so!
This of course could just mean a drop in the number of Irish journals being published. Maybe Irish scientists are publishing just as prolifically as ever in other journals... We can check in a few months and see if tardy indexing makes up the shortfall.

djpbarry

Dan_Solo wrote: »

That's a drop in publications of 33% in 1 year, and I expect things to be at least as bad in 2011.

Because?