Sir

Japan now has a greater scientific output than the United Kingdom, judging by the 1997 Japanese white paper (consultation document) on science and technology1. The figures for 1995 clearly show that Japan ranks second only to the United States2 in terms of scientific output. In my opinion, the Japanese scientific contribution is underestimated in the West.

Compared with the United Kingdom, Japan has a larger population (by a factor of 2.1), a larger economy (by a factor of 4.4), spends more on scientific research (by a factor of 3.5), has a larger base of researchers (by a factor of 3.7), and awards more advanced science degrees (by a factor of 1.9) (see Table 1 in Supplementary information and ref. 3).

Japanese industry spends relatively more on research and development, whereas Japanese government institutions and universities receive less funding, than their UK counterparts. Although Japan is officially in recession, these differences are so large that Japan continues to be ahead of the United Kingdom in these categories. Science funding in Japan has continued to increase despite economic difficulties.

Japan has a 23.9% share of world exports of high-tech products, compared with the 8.3% UK share. It has a trade balance (exports/imports) of 3.52 for high-tech products compared with 0.93 for the United Kingdom.

These figures show unequivocally that Japan has a much bigger scientific base than the United Kingdom and that Japanese companies are much more engaged in research than their UK counterparts. These factors would, in part, explain Japan's dominance in technology-based industries.

In 1994, Japan produced 9.6% of the world's scientific papers published in major journals and had an 8.0% share of the number of citations of papers (see Tables 2 and 3 in Supplementary information). Corresponding figures for the United Kingdom were 9.1% and 11.6%, respectively. This undoubtedly results from the much greater increase in research and development expenditure in Japan (237%) than in the United Kingdom (126%) during 1980-95.

A fuller version of this Correspondence is at http://www.gsj.go.jp/kiyo/glasby.html