Singapore Science 'sickness'

Singapore is always proud of being an advanced technology and world-class in research and development. Billions of dollars in the country's budget are used to promote scientific research, especially in the field of life sciences. But, all recognition may be different if scientific statistics are considered specifically.

According to Thomson's Information Science Institute (ISI), Singapore's science has wasted a lot of time. During 1999-2003, about 20 fields of Singapore's science reached the interaction index (impact factor - used to assess the importance of scientific papers) below the average of the world.

Only some areas of mathematics (10% above the world average) and agricultural science (+49) are above average. Meanwhile, the physical and technical sciences that Singapore still boasted, achieved disastrous results: material science (-5), chemistry (-11), computer science (-18), and thorough art (-18), physics (-38) and earth science (-52), all below average. This is completely in contrast to the number of published works in the areas of computer science, engineering, material science, physics, and especially mathematics.

The Observatory Science Research Center - Singapore (Photo: answers) Even in life science, an area of ​​great interest today, the situation is not very bright. We can see the following two categories:

1. Hot (easy to commercialize) fields: agricultural science (+48), science of plants and animals (-2), microbiology (-5), biology and biochemistry (- 14), molecular biology (-19)

2. Cold (traditional or difficult to commercialize) fields: Immunology (-33), neuroscience (-36), medicine (-36), ecology (-37), pharmacology (-40), psychology (-50)

Scientific contributions will be attributed to Singapore when the author's address is in Singapore. So data on Singapore's works do not differentiate between the true achievements of Singapore researchers and the results of reputable foreign scientists who are encouraged to do so. work in Singapore.

It should also be noted that the money will be prioritized for the research directions that have achieved the highest average citation. That will again create an incentive for fraudulent statistics on the achievements cited by the studies.

The most worrisome thing is, both medicine (-36) and education (-54) are very weak in the race for cited achievements.

According to the data summarized in the period 1999-2003, Singapore ranked 36th on the abundance of scientific research (based on the number of published works in all fields), but ranked 92 in level Relative interaction (number of citations per work).

There are also many who argue that, because Singapore is limited in human resources, has no natural resources, and is also starting slowly, so the evidence to criticize Singapore science is not fair to Very, and the limitations of this country's science are not very serious.

But, try comparing Singapore to other countries. Israel, for example, has a population of just over 6 million people a bit. It can be said that it is the country with the least natural resources in the Middle East countries, and it has been in constant conflict and conflict. Thus, according to the above argument, Israel should be one of the most technologically underdeveloped countries in the world. But, in fact, Israel is the world famous for high technology: it ranks 16th in the level of abundance in scientific research and ranks 24th in relative level of interaction.

Currently, Korea is the country with the highest number of scientific works among the five Asian tigers . Belgium, a relatively small country with only 10 million people, has 9.5 works per 1000 people and 9.43 citations on one project (ranked 19th). Meanwhile, Singapore statistics are 8.6 works per 1000 people and 4.58 citations per building. Even Lebanon, though experiencing constant warfare, still surpasses Singapore in terms of the relative interaction of research works in the field of computer science, an area that Singapore still considers to belong to Its biggest strength (Lebanon is 1.12; Singapore is 1.03).

The science of many countries, especially Asian countries, often suffers from misconceptions. In some countries, this misconception is very serious. The misperception of Singapore science is probably quite serious.