Saturday, November 16, 2013

Chart of R&D Spending, Number of Scientists

Here's an interesting chart from this week's Science magazine: each country's R&D spending as a percentage of GDP, and its number of scientists per capita.


In a separate article, Science published this:



5 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

They've mislabelled Germany and Switzerland, surely?

Their circles have the same centre, so the # eng/pop is the same, as is sci/gdp. But Germany is much bigger. So it must be the bigger circle.

David Appell said...

Yes, you must be right.

This document was the source for the Science article:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78682496/2012

It shows that Germany's R&D was 2.87% of GDP, and Switzerland 3.00%. Multiplying by the GDPs they give shows that R&D in 2012 was

Switzerland $9.7 B$
Germany $84 B

Chris_Winter said...

What I don't understand is why the diameters of the circles vary -- or what the diameter is supposed to represent.

I could download the entire article, but I tend to distrust those sites that want me to download a non-standard app.

Chris_Winter said...

Oh, OK — I missed the fact that the R&D Magazine story is not the source of the chart. I have now downloaded the Science PDF.

David Appell said...

Chris: The size of the circles represents the country's total R&D budget.

(Sorry, I accidentally cut that part of the caption off.)