Is the randomized controlled drug trial in Europe lagging behind the USA?

AIMS: Performance of randomized controlled drug trials (drugRCTs) adds to the scientific output, scientific knowledge, scientific training and up-to-date status of healthcare and may drive economy. The purpose of this study was to benchmark Europe's position on drugRCTs relative to the rest of the world, and to identify factors that may drive this performance. METHODS: The number of scientific publications on drugRCTs, indexed in PubMed and Thomson Scientific/Web of Science database over the period 1995-2004, was used as a proxy measure for the quantitative drugRCT output. The international citation impact of these publications was used as a proxy measure for the qualitative drugRCT output. RESULTS: Country's origin of 103 211 publications was determined. After adjustment for population size, the number of drugRCT publications from Europe, USA and Australia/Japan was 102, 124 and 44 publications per million inhabitants, respectively. The proportional increase in publication output from 1995 until 2004 was lower in Europe compared with the USA and Australia/Japan (29.1, 40.1 and 63.4%, respectively). The number of citations per publication was 4.9 in Europe, 7.0 in the USA and 3.4 in Australia/Japan. Within Europe, the UK, Germany and Italy produced most publications. Country-specific factors associated with publication output in Europe were the number of pharmaceutical companies with headquarters in a country (R(2) = 0.71, P < 0.001), national R&D expenditures by pharmaceutical companies (R(2) = 0.63, P < 0.001) and health-related R&D expenditures by national governments (R(2) = 0.22, P = 0.052). CONCLUSIONS: When adjusted for population size, quantitative and qualitative performance of drugRCTs in Europe lags behind the USA but is ahead of Australia/Japan. Several factors appear to explain the differences, among which are the number of headquarters of pharmaceutical companies in a country, the research expenditures by pharmaceutical companies, as well as health-related R&D expenditures of a country. To enhance and strengthen Europe's position, researchers may strengthen their collaborations with local pharmaceutical companies, and national governments could increase their budgets for medical research funding.

Capturing 'R&D excellence': indicators, international statistics, and innovative universities.

Excellent research may contribute to successful science-based technological innovation. We define 'R&D excellence' in terms of scientific research that has contributed to the development of influential technologies, where 'excellence' refers to the top segment of a statistical distribution based on internationally comparative performance scores. Our measurements are derived from frequency counts of literature references ('citations') from patents to research publications during the last 15 years. The 'D' part in R&D is represented by the top 10% most highly cited 'excellent' patents worldwide. The 'R' part is captured by research articles in international scholarly journals that are cited by these patented technologies. After analyzing millions of citing patents and cited research publications, we find very large differences between countries worldwide in terms of the volume of domestic science contributing to those patented technologies. Where the USA produces the largest numbers of cited research publications (partly because of database biases), Switzerland and Israel outperform the US after correcting for the size of their national science systems. To tease out possible explanatory factors, which may significantly affect or determine these performance differentials, we first studied high-income nations and advanced economies. Here we find that the size of R&D expenditure correlates with the sheer size of cited publications, as does the degree of university research cooperation with domestic firms. When broadening our comparative framework to 70 countries (including many medium-income nations) while correcting for size of national science systems, the important explanatory factors become the availability of human resources and quality of science systems. Focusing on the latter factor, our in-depth analysis of 716 research-intensive universities worldwide reveals several universities with very high scores on our two R&D excellence indicators. Confirming the above macro-level findings, an in-depth study of 27 leading US universities identifies research expenditure size as a prime determinant. Our analytical model and quantitative indicators provides a supplementary perspective to input-oriented statistics based on R&D expenditures. The country-level findings are indicative of significant disparities between national R&D systems. Comparing the performance of individual universities, we observe large differences within national science systems. The top ranking 'innovative' research universities contribute significantly to the development of advanced science-based technologies.

Twenty-first century macro-trends in the institutional fabric of science: bibliometric monitoring and analysis.

Some say that world science has become more 'applied', or at least more 'application-oriented', in recent years. Replacing the ill-defined distinction between 'basic research' and 'applied research', we introduce 'research application orientation' domains as an alternative conceptual and analytical framework for examining research output growth patterns. To distinguish possible developmental trajectories we define three institutional domains: 'university', 'industry', 'hospitals'. Our macro-level bibliometric analysis takes a closer look at general trends within and across some 750 of the world's largest research-intensive universities. To correct for database changes, our time-series analysis was applied to both a fixed journal set (same research journals and conference proceedings over time) and a dynamic journal set (changing set of publication outlets). We find that output growth in the 'hospital research orientation' has significantly outpaced the other two application domains, especially since 2006/2007. This happened mainly because of the introduction of new publication outlets in the WoS, but also partially because some universities-especially in China-seem to have become more visible in this domain. Our analytical approach needs further broadening and deepening to provide a more definitive answer whether hospitals and the medical sector are becoming increasingly dominant as a domain of scientific knowledge production and an environment for research applications.

University-industry R&D linkage metrics: validity and applicability in world university rankings.

In September 2015 Thomson Reuters published its Ranking of Innovative Universities (RIU). Covering 100 large research-intensive universities worldwide, Stanford University came in first, MIT was second and Harvard in third position. But how meaningful is this outcome? In this paper we will take a critical view from a methodological perspective. We focus our attention on the various types of metrics available, whether or not data redundancies are addressed, and if metrics should be assembled into a single composite overall score or not. We address these issues in some detail by emphasizing one metric in particular: university-industry co-authored publications (UICs). We compare the RIU with three variants of our own University-Industry R&D Linkage Index, which we derived from the bibliometric analysis of 750 research universities worldwide. Our findings highlight conceptual and methodological problems with UIC-based data, as well as computational weaknesses such university ranking systems. Avoiding choices between size-dependent or independent metrics, and between single-metrics and multi-metrics systems, we recommend an alternative 'scoreboard' approach: (1) without weighing systems of metrics and composite scores; (2) computational procedures and information sources are made more transparent; (3) size-dependent metrics are kept separate from size-independent metrics; (4) UIC metrics are selected according to the type of proximity relationship between universities and industry.