New Zealand’s RS&T priorities

MoRST have just released a discussion document which introduces a new structure for RS&T investment, aimed at allowing for greater strategic priority setting. Submissions are due by November 18th. Get it here.

What do you think of the feedback document and where would you put our rather modest science dollar?

While you are pondering this, here is where the rest of the world puts its intellectual grunt: the pie chart below shows the proportion of papers published by subject area over the last ten years. The physical and medical sciences account for two thirds of the world’s publications.

In contrast, here is where New Zealand puts its efforts:

Setting priorities is clearly nothing new for New Zealand — as the charts show, our science system strongly emphasises agricultural and environmental sciences at the expense of physical sciences. Have we got the balance right?