SCIENCE IN TAIWAN

Taiwan’s world share of science and social-science papers over a recent five-year period, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 21 fields in the Thomson Reuters database. Also, Taiwan’s relative citation impact compared to the world average in each field, in percentage terms.

Field	% papers fr. Tiawan	Impact vs. world
Engineering	4.49	-7
Computer Science	4.12	-16
Materials Science	2.99	-7
Physics	2.55	-19
Economics & Business	2.28	-43
Taiwan's overall percent share, all fields: 1.93
Pharmacology & Toxicology	1.90	-19
Chemistry	1.77	-11
Clinical Medicine	1.62	-30
Mathematics	1.49	-11
Agricultural Sciences	1.35	+15
Biology & Biochemistry	1.31	-32
Geosciences	1.27	-13
Environment/Ecology	1.27	-23
Microbiology	1.16	-31
Social Sciences	1.14	-21
Space Science	1.11	-14
Immunology	1.06	-48
Molecular Biology & Genetics	1.04	-41
Neuroscience & Behavior	0.90	-39
Plant & Animal Science	0.89	-4
Psychiatry/Psychology	0.82	-42

Between 2005 and 2009, Thomson Reuters indexed 100,232 papers that listed at least one author address in Taiwan. Of those papers, the highest percentage appeared in journals indexed under the heading of engineering, followed closely by computer science. As the right-hand column indicates, the citations-per-paper score for Taiwan in engineering was 7% below the world mark (2.04 cites per paper for Taiwan versus the world average of 2.19). On the other hand, the impact of papers from Taiwan-based authors exceeded the world average by 15% in agricultural sciences, and was also comparatively strong in plant & animal science and materials science.