Bricks or people? Investing more and better in Science, a dilemma for South American countries
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Abstract
Productivity of the Science and Technology (S&T) sector of Latin American countries would require more public and private investment to increase. Despite significant progress in the first 15 years of this century, South American investment in Science as percentage of GDP has been 10-fold lower than that of Europe. Though the need to increase S&T investment is clear, less obvious is whether money should go to infrastructure or human capital. Using global databases we assessed scientific productivity, number of researchers and resources devoted to S&T. We evaluated production for Europe, the Americas and China. We then focused on three Mercosur countries: Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Scientific production was related to S&T expenditure and to the number of researchers. We found that countries investing ~2% of their GDP may have a 5-fold variation in their productivity. Our results suggest than human capital explains a higher proportion of the S&T productivity than the total amount of resources devoted to science. Thus, people would matter more than infrastructure in determining the scientific output. The positive trends in the resources devoted to Science in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay do not allow, though, to reach in a decade the levels of productivity of European countries.
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This Zenodo record is a permanently preserved version of a PREreview. You can view the complete PREreview at https://prereview.org/reviews/14647890.
The pre-print presents an exploratory correlation analysis on the relationship between scientific productivity (as measured by the number of papers published) and monetary investments to science and technology. The results are rather expected; both the investments and amount of researchers correlate with the amount of papers published.
Notable issue:
* The authors do not discuss the potential causal logic involved. While they conclude that investments are needed to increase productivity, an equally reasonable statement would be that investments are needed to increase the size of scientific workforce, which, in turn, should (or might) increase productivity. This point is noted in Section 4 …
This Zenodo record is a permanently preserved version of a PREreview. You can view the complete PREreview at https://prereview.org/reviews/14647890.
The pre-print presents an exploratory correlation analysis on the relationship between scientific productivity (as measured by the number of papers published) and monetary investments to science and technology. The results are rather expected; both the investments and amount of researchers correlate with the amount of papers published.
Notable issue:
* The authors do not discuss the potential causal logic involved. While they conclude that investments are needed to increase productivity, an equally reasonable statement would be that investments are needed to increase the size of scientific workforce, which, in turn, should (or might) increase productivity. This point is noted in Section 4 with the statement that the "indirect evidence we provide here suggests that the main effort should be directed to increase the number of researchers". However, no such evidence is actually presented.
Thus, it seems that two equations would need to be estimated (e.g., with the systefit package for R):
(1) Papers = a + b(Workforce) + stat. comp.
(2) Workforce = c + d(Investments) + stat. comp.
where a and c are constants, b and d regression coefficients, and stat. comp. denotes residuals. Note also that dummy variables could (or should) be used in both equations to control the annual trend.. Furthermore, it would be interesting to hear a broader brief discussion about the second equation because the amount of scientific workforce is presumably dependent also on the output of basic education and investments made to it, among other things.
To address this criticism, besides estimating the system of equations, it might be reasonable to outright drop the first equation out from the analysis, perhaps briefly noting the correlation. In any case, construct validity should be discussed because the number of papers published is probably not a good metric. Furthermore, the literature probably indicates also something about whether scientific output (be it papers or something else) correlates with, say, patents, start-ups founded, or something alike.
Lesser but noteworthy issues:
* The elaboration of the methodology is not entirely clear as Section 2 talks about number of researchers on one hand and number of papers per 100,000 inhabitants on the other.
* There are incorrect capital letters already in the abstract; i.e., Science and Technology (S&T) should be science and technology (S&T). Later on, there are other similar cases, such as Development Policies, Scientific Development Strategy, freedom-centered Development, and probably more.
* There are undefined acronyms (GDP) already in the abstract but also later on (e.g., R&D).
* The hyperlinks would be better placed in footnotes.
Competing interests
The author declares that they have no competing interests.
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