Are the US still the place to be in Science?
By Antonio Marques • Oct 3rd, 2007 • Category: Employment, OpinionIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In Europe, the idea that has been forced upon scientists basically since the beginning of formation is that one without a Post-Doc period spent in the United States is a nobody in science.
The big majority of people in academia faculty positions have spent some years in some major lab in the US and the idea is just too sticky to challenge.
Nonetheless, the trend might be shifting, or at least cooling down to some degree.
According to a recent study by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), not everything goes well for the US science block, particular in Life Sciences. You can get the full report here.
In this study, you can see that while the number of students in US graduate programs as well as post-docs have risen from 25,000 to 33,000 since 1981, the number of PhDs with academic tenure as plateaued at around 20,000 resulting in a drop from 45 to 30%.
Of course the numbers are affected by a dramatic rise in post-doc positions being awarded to temporary residents:
From these we can conclude that while the trend of post-doc time in the US is still very much going upwards for foreign researchers, the dream of finding a job in US academia after the said post-doc time might be crumbling.
At the same time, the National Science Foundation (NSF) reported that since the early 1990s, the number of peer-reviewed articles published by US-based researchers in the science & engineering field as also stagnated in spite of the increased funding.
The total number of articles in biology and biomedicine published by US-based authors went up from 46,272 in 1992 to 48,282 in 2003 while during the same period, EU-15 based authors saw an increase in published papers from 36,473 to 49,383. Accordingly, the 10% most-cited papers dropped from 45.9% to 37.6% in biology and 61.8% to 55.8% in biomedicine for US-based research. EU-15 saw an increase from 28.0% to 36.6% in biology and 24.5% to 27.4% in biomedicine.
Although the US is still the most influential country in science (as seen by the top 10% most cited papers), some major changes are needed if the trend keeps dropping.
So, the question opened by these numbers is Is it still worth for foreign scientists to pursue a science career in the US?
What do you think about it?
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