Figure 1: Taiwan’s research output has increased substantially as compared to other emerging and established research countries since 1991

Taiwan aims to become an innovation-oriented country. Toward this end, the govement has invested a substantial research budget in innovation, industry and related scientific fields. As a result, Taiwan’s performance in science and technology (S&T) has attracted global attention recently. One of the means to make known the scientific strength of a country is the ranking of scientific papers published in international jouals. Based on the analysis made by the NARL’s Science & Technology Policy Research and Information Center (STPI) using the bibliographic databases of the scientific citation index (SCI) and the social sciences citation index (SSCI) from Thomson Reuters, one of the world’s leading sources of scientific intelligence, has seen Taiwan’s scientific output (publications) progressing steadily both in quantity (Figure 1) and quality in the past years. On the world rank in 2009, Taiwan is in the 16th rank by volumes of papers, which are two notches up from 2005. In terms of citations per paper, Taiwan is placed in the 19th position.

Figure 2: Percentage distribution of Taiwan’s SCI papers in different journal IF rank % ranges in 2004 and 2008

To pROVide a gross estimation for the quality of Taiwan’s SCI papers and the relative importance of jouals where these papers appeared, the widely accepted impact factor (IF), which is the average number of citations to articles published in a joual in a particular year or period, for ranking jouals in the subject category is employed. High IF values are high ranking orders. Thereafter the ranking order for a specific joual is divided by the total number of jouals in the same category to obtain the rank in %. For instance, the joual Science belongs to the category of Multidisciplinary Sciences with a total of 42 jouals, and has IF value of 28.103 that leads to the second ranking for 2008. Dividing this rank order by 48 jouals, the IF rank % for Science comes to 4.8%. Based on this approach, it shows that 42% of Taiwan’s SCI papers in 2008 fall under the top two IF rank % ranges. And this is a significant impROVement from 2004 (Figure 2).

Table 1: Taiwan’s share of world publications in selected fields

While Taiwan’s general scientific output is rising, some specific fields are standing out (Table 1). In terms of the volume, Engineering and Materials Science are ranked 9th and 10th, respectively, among 150 countries, while Computer Science is placed in 11th. On the highly-cited papers, Engineering displays its strength with ranking of 9th, outperforming other fields in Taiwan. In addition, Materials Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, Chemistry, Psychiatry/Psychology, Agricultural Sciences, Physics and Clinical Medicine are all ranked within the top 25. These significant outputs from the govement’s spending on research and development shall serve as a base of Taiwan’s endeavor to build an innovation-oriented country in the global trend of knowledge.

Taiwan’s continuing pursuit in technological innovation and value creation is to be achieved through a three-prong approach of promotion and extension, industrial development and international collaboration. Efforts are to further upgrade research capabilities of major S&T fields, especially those have had less significant outputs, to fuel positive influence on industrial development and to create business niches in Asia and other parts of the world. The signs are now evident that there is a trajectory in S&T that will bring Taiwan up to the level where it can realize the potential to the benefit of its population and economy as well as contributing to global knowledge networks. In line with this, the NARL-STPI, as the govement’s S&T think tank, will identify S&T areas and key technologies, and articulate related S&T strategies in response to key future social demands, emerging global markets, and future challenges facing Taiwan.