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Archive February 2010

CRI bibliometric performance: Part III Shaun Hendy Feb 19

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Last week, John Key signalled in a speech to Parliament that there would be changes to the way the Crown Research Institutes are funded.  Indeed, the debate over CRI funding has continued pretty much unabated since they were created.  In earlier posts, we looked at the growth in the total bibliometric output of the CRIs and at the increase in their citation impact relative to the rest of New Zealand.  In this post, I will look at the relationship between CRI funding and bibliometric output.  The data suggest to me that the growth in bibliometric output has been driven by the development of new revenue sources.

CRI total revenueFirst, I want to look at CRI revenues since 1994.  It is clear that CRI revenue has increased by about 30% over this period, once adjusted for inflation (figures are given in 2008 $).  Not all CRIs seem report their levels of public good science funding (or PGSF, which I will define here as the level of FRST and capability funding), but for those that do (most), I also plot PGSF revenue after adjusting for inflation.  Note that the PGSF revenue, at least for those CRIs that report it, has remained static over this period.

This is especially interesting given statements made when the CRIs were established.  Here is Sir James Stewart, Chair of the CRI Implementation Steering Committee:

“The science staff surpluses are not an outcome of the restructuring, but in part stem from chronic underfunding of science … Science departments had carried too many people for the money available.”

So how have staffing levels changed at the CRIs?  Statistics NZ collects FTE data from the CRIs, assigning research FTEs to the categories of researcher, technician and support staff.  Here is how Statistics NZ defines the different categories:

Researchers
Researchers are defined as those staff engaged in the conception and/or creation of new knowledge/products; personnel involved in the planning or management of scientific and technical aspects of R&D projects, and software developers.

Technicians
Technicians are defined as staff engaged in technical tasks in support of R&D, normally under the direction and supervision of a researcher.

Other Supporting Staff
Other Supporting Staff are described as staff providing specific information acquisition and treatment (for example drafting, typing, maintaining libraries etc. or specific administrative support such as bookkeeping, personnel services etc.)

CRI staff ratiosThe COMU website reports that just over 80% of CRI staff were involved in research in 2008.  On the right, the plot shows how the numbers of these research staff in each of the Stats NZ categories have changed according to the Stats NZ R&D survey.  (Note – in an earlier post, I reported on the numbers of researchers at CRIs, but there I used government sector researchers as a proxy, as not all the CRI data has been published.  The data on the right is the actual CRI data kindly supplied to me by MoRST.)  From the plot, we see that research staff FTEs have steadily increased at the expense of technical and support staff.  The decline in support staff since the mid-1990s is particularly dramatic.  This is something that has been very noticeable to me during my time as a CRI scientist.

CRI publications per dollar Now let’s look at how the revenues above scale with staff FTE and bibliometric output.  In the plot on the left, I give the total revenue (in 2008 $) per Researcher FTE (not research staff). This has remained relatively stable since 1994, fluctuating at around $400k per Researcher FTE.  On the other hand, revenue per paper published declined sharply in the 1990s, but then stabilised at roughly $500k per paper over the last decade. Of course, a good fraction of the research conducted in the CRIs will not lead to a publication, so this number does not reflect the true cost of a publication.

As we have seen, the CRIs’ bibliometric output has risen since their creation, and their citation impact has grown faster than the rest of New Zealand.  It also seems that they have become much less dependent on PGSF funding since they were created, with total revenue growing by 30% while PGSF revenue remained static.  Researcher FTE levels have risen, albeit at the expense of support and technical staff (although this may be typical of many businesses?), while the revenue per researcher FTE has remained static. Thus, the generation of revenue from non-PGSF sources, has led to increases in researcher staffing levels, which has in turn lifted the bibliometric output of the CRIs. To go any further, we will need to look more closely at the performance of individual CRIs.

Key speech highlights high-tech manufacturing Shaun Hendy Feb 12

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In his speech to Parliament earlier this week, John Key signalled that supporting high-tech manufacturing would be a priority for his Government.  As my colleague Richard Blaikie, Director of the MacDiarmid Institute, pointed out in his newsletter last week to MacDiarmid Institute researchers, New Zealand is becoming increasingly reliant on high-tech industry for our export receipts:

New Zealand’s high-tech industries are now our third-biggest exporter earners, outpacing wine and meat exports and sitting relatively close behind the dairy and tourism sectors.  This is according to the Technology Investment Network’s 2009 TIN100 Report, sponsored by NZTE and Ernst & Young, which says that technology exports rose 4 per cent last year to NZ$5.1b, compared to the dairy sector’s NZ$8.8b.

The Report, now in its fifth year, makes excellent reading if you are interested in the growth of New Zealand’s high-tech industries, and sits very well alongside the messages and stories that Paul Callaghan makes so eloquently in Wool to Weta.

You can get an executive summary of the 2009 TIN100 report here.  The full report is well worth reading if you can spare the $200, or you have a chance to look at it in a library.  Paul Callaghan’s arguments are also worth reading:  take a look at his Herald article here or buy the book.  As Paul points out, to catch Australia in per-capita prosperity, we would need to lift our GDP by US$30 billion a year.  We could increase the number of dairy farms five-fold, or we could quadruple the number of tourists … well, you can see why Alan Bollard might be a pessimist.  But back to Richard Blaikie:

The scope for future growth is enormous, and the TIN100 people have pulled out “Ten Companies to Watch” that grew combined revenues by a massive 34% in 2009 to a total of NZ$1.8b.  The high-tech growth potential is not resource limited as for our other important big sectors, and with the price-to-weight ratios of many products measured in dollars per gram (rather than dollars per tonne for commodities) the tyranny of distance to market is not a show-stopper either.

Can we turn NZ$5b in exports into NZ$50b?  It’s a tough ask, one which I doubt we’ll achieve by tinkering with the tax system, but it’s worth remembering that this is essentially what Finland did with Nokia in the mid 1990s.  As I have discussed in previous posts, the Finns took Nokia from a Fisher & Paykel-sized electrical appliance company to a globally dominant mobile phone company.

Now I don’t know what’s sufficient to turn an F&P into a Nokia, but it is clear from our patent studies that the Finns built Nokia on the intellectual grunt of a large cohort of engineers.  And I don’t know about you, but turning out 300 PhD engineers a year in New Zealand sounds a lot easier to me than quadrupling our tourist numbers (any room on your couch?) or quintupling the dairy herd (space for a cow or two on your lawn?).

CRI bibliometric performance: Part II Shaun Hendy Feb 10

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In a post a few weeks ago, I looked at the total published output of the CRIs from 1993. Now I want to look at the citations to CRI papers. I will use two citation measures. The first is a two year impact factor, which is a measure that is often used to rank journals. The impact factor of a CRI in 2008, for example, is the average number of citations in 2008 for papers published by authors at that CRI in 2006 and 2007. The second measure I will use is a 5-year impact factor i.e.  the average number of citations to papers in 2008 that were published between 2003-2007 is the 2008 5-year impact factor.

Now, the analysis I am going to give below is somewhat naive. I should really be breaking down the citations by subject area (as pointed by Crikey Creek’s Daniel Collins in a comment last year). This is important because rates of citations differ considerably between disciplines – unfortunately I haven’t had the time to do this, except in a few special cases such as my own Institute. Thus, differences in impact factor between Institutes will depend on the areas in which they work. Changes in that difference over time may reflect changes in focus within Institutes, rather than changes in impact of the research conducted.

Why do citation rates differ between disciplines? At least part of the difference comes from the degree of empiricism within a discipline. Medical science frequently makes use of the aggregation of meta-data from many studies, some of which may be too small to have statistical significance on their own. So if your small study suggests that  smoking is a risk factor for diabetes, it will be important to cite as many other studies of smoking and diabetes as possible to give your reader context. Mathematics on the other hand relies on mathematical proof. To prove the Reimann hypothesis, you may only need to cite a handful of papers that contain results you rely on in your proof. You hardly need to cite every paper on the Reimann hypothesis that has appeared in print. Not surprisingly, journals in medical science typically have much higher impact factors that mathematics journals.

CRI Impact vs NZ On to the results. Firstly I have plotted the CRI (2 year) impact factor from 1995 to 2008 (on the right) against the New Zealand impact factor as calculated from the Thompson Reuters database. Firstly, we note that both data series show large increases over this time period. However, in 1995 the CRIs trail New Zealand as a whole, whereas in 2008 the CRIs lead New Zealand. The data is sufficiently noisy that one can’t to assert that the CRIs are significantly different from the rest of the country with much confidence however.

CRI 5yr Impact However, with the 5-year impact factor, the trend seems clearer: the 5-year impact factor of the CRIs is below those of New Zealand as a whole at the end of the 1990s, but by the mid 2000s it surpasses those of the rest of the country. As I mentioned above, there could be a number of explanations for this. CRI citations per paper have grown faster than New Zealand as a while. For example, I wonder if this could reflect a diversification of research activities at Universities, where disciplines with lower impact factors have started publishing more, perhaps as a result of the Performance Based Research Fund.

Unfortunately, without breaking down citations by discipline we can’t really tell whether this does reflect an increase in relative impact by CRI researchers. However, the data does suggest that this would be a worthwhile exercise: why has CRI impact surpassed that of the rest of New Zealand in the last decade?

CRI bibliometric performance: Part III

Kiwi superconductivity industry overcomes resistance Shaun Hendy Feb 08

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This week, New Zealand hosts the 18th International Superconductivity Industry Summit, where multi-national heavy-weights like Siemans AG will rub shoulders with New Zealand-based companies such as General Cable NZ Ltd and HTS-110.  As the superconductivity industry matures over the next decade, these New Zealand companies have an excellent chance of becoming significant export earners.  How did New Zealand come to have a superconductivity industry in the first place, and why are multi-national companies descending on Te Papa later this week to hear what we have to say?

Superconductivity was discovered almost 100 years ago, when it was found that many metals completely lose electrical resistance once they are cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero (-273 degrees C).  When metals become this cold, rather than jostling and shoving their way through an electrical wire, electrons can pair up and ‘waltz’ quantum mechanically along the wire without resistance.  Today, to produce the intense magnetic fields needed by MRI machines, expensive liquid helium is used to cool metal electromagnets to temperatures at which they will superconduct.

Since the original discovery, many scientists have have tried and failed to find a material that would superconduct at room temperature:  such a material could allow us to dramatically shrink any device that needs powerful electromagnets, including electric motors.  I was lucky enough recently to see a talk by Jeff Tallon, one of New Zealand’s leading physicists, on the prospects for room temperature superconductivity.  Unfortunately, recent work by Jeff and James Storey (a kiwi physicist at Cambridge) suggests that room temperature superconductivity is unlikely to be possible, and even if it does exist, would not be practical enough for real applications.

However, thanks to Jeff and many other scientists at Gracefield in the Hutt Valley, we have the next best thing.  In the 1980s, Jeff and his colleagues at the DSIR (now Industrial Research Ltd) discovered a material that would superconduct at temperatures where nitrogen is a liquid (-196 degrees C).  Liquid nitrogen is a much cheaper coolant than liquid helium, so Jeff’s material makes it feasible to exploit superconductivity in many technologies beyond MRI machines.

So why can’t you catch a 300kph superconducting maglev train to visit Jeff in Lower Hutt two decades on?  Inconveniently, these ‘high temperature’ superconductors have proved to be very brittle, and it has taken more than 20 years to figure out how to turn them into wires that are ductile enough for real world applications.  Even then, these superconducting wires are difficult to work with, and require lots of know how to turn them into working electromagnets.  It is in these technologies that New Zealand has developed an edge. 

What is particularly interesting to me is the role that intellectual property has played in the development of this sector in New Zealand.  Jeff and his team only won the patents for their superconductor (BSCCO) after a long battle, but the paper value of these patents will quite possibly be dwarfed by the value of the industry that has been established around them.  Yet it was these patents that attracted the patient investment by government and others, which has been necessary for developing New Zealand’s capabilities in high temperature superconductivity.  These capabilities are now embodied in the skills and know how of a large team of scientists and engineers. 

In turn, this IP was generated by basic research undertaken at the DSIR.  The research was not carefully vetted by a purchasing agency prior to proceeding, nor was it undertaken after a careful assessment of New Zealand’s competitive advantage.  Rather, it was an inspired piece of ‘bottom-up’ science, by a team of talented New Zealanders, responding rapidly to international discoveries reported in the latest scientific journals. 

New Zealand has got this far with superconductivity because it backed a team of scientists conducting fundamental research in a highly competitive field, and because it then showed the patience to invest in developing the resulting technology for two decades.  Overseas investment has been crucial, and so the HTS wire itself is now made in the US by American Superconductor.  While the success of New Zealand’s superconductivity industry is not yet a sure thing, and further investment will be needed for it to grow, it is now earning export revenue with high-tech products that no other country can match.