Figure 1. Year 1990-2013 annual R&D expenditure (in PPP: purchasing power parity) and publication output in ten reference medical journals by China, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. There has been a stead decline since its peak in 1997 for Japanese scientists to publish in the 10 reference medical journal. However, there is no perception that the Japanese research capability deteriorated since 1997.
Ten reputable medical journals were included as the indicator for analysis, i.e. 1) Circulation Research, 2)Blood, 3) Leukemia, 4) Stem Cells, 5) Haematologica, 6) Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 7) Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 8) Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, 9) Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, and 10) British Journal of Haematology.
Figure 2. The top 20 countries with R&D spending in year 2012. The corporation R&D spending is shown in the insert.
(source: http://data.worldbank.org/, and http://stats.oecd.org/)
Comparison of Japan, Germany, France, UK and Switzerland in population size, annual R&D expenditure, and total publications in the 10 reference medical journals (presented in relative ratios). The values for Japan were adjusted to be one. Of note Japan has the combined population of France and UK; Japan’s R& D spending was four times of that of UK or France, and more than twice than that of Germany. (source: http://data.worldbank.org/, and http://stats.oecd.org/)
Supplement Fig 1. The accumulative scientific achievement items by various regions at various time-points in history (from BC3000 to year 2012, totaling 515 items). [Adapted from Dong et al. 2014, reference 11]. This table partially reflects the geographical isolation of China.
