Emerging Scientific Powers.

Yesterday the Royal Society published the analysis of a report into scientific output and investments of countries across the world. The report showed that emerging countries like China and Brazil are rapidly expanding their role in the scientific community and investing more funding into it's development, while growth in the scientific community of the United States, the United Kingdom and other European countries has slowed down considerably.

In 1996 the United States published 292,513 Scientific papers, around ten times more then China's 25,474 papers however since then China has invested billions into expanding it's educational system and actively promoted for pupils to move into the field of science. In 2008 China published 184,080 scientific papers a massive increase since 1996. The United States still out-published China producing 316,317 Scientific papers however it's a minor increase when compared to China's sevenfold increase in scientific output.

Chinese Space Programme

The Report also found that China is not the only emerging country that is actively promoting and funding the improvement of scientific research across the globe. Iran is the fastest growing country in terms of scientific publications, rapidly expanding from publishing just 736 Scientific Papers in 1996 to 13,238 in 2008. The Iranian Government has also boosted R&D spending planning to increase it to 4% by 2030 from just 0.59% in GDP in 2006

Iran University of Science and Technology

China and the rest of the emerging scientific powers still have a few more years of funding and modernization to go to over-take the quality of science seen in the United Kingdom and the United States though and scientists need to work together to solve issues like climate change and the rapidly growing population.

Emerging countries are simply taking a more active role in their scientific community, with the current economic crisis still in full-effect countries like China, Turkey, Singapore and Brazil are increasing funding and assistance to their scientific communities and getting good results while funding from projects in the United States and the United Kingdom has been on the decline with educational systems not providing enough motivation for people to get involved with the field of science.

University of Science and Technology in China

China has already replaced the United Kingdom becoming the worlds second largest producer of research and already people are predicting that China could replace the United States as the worlds largest producer by around 2013-2020. The reasons for these predictions are quite clear, China has been increasing 20% per year since 1999 and the country spends over $100bn on scientific research. The educational system in China is also another factor for China's rapid growth in the scientific community, as in 2006 approximately 1.5 million students graduated from Chinese Universities with fields focused on engineering and science.

In the passing decades with governments in Europe and North America taking part in vast austerity measures and emerging countries in Asia and South America increasing government spending including that in the educational and R&D sector it's becoming increasingly clear that European and North American scientific facilities will soon have a new series of rivals to compete and work with in the future.