Natalia Gindilis

This essay compares productivity in various scientific disciplines in the United States, Europe, and Russia during the period from 1983 to 2003. Relative productivity is measured by volume of publications in a particular discipline in proportion to the total scientific output of a given country, as well as to the global volume of publications in the discipline. Germany and France are distinguished by the relatively high productivity in physico-chemical and exact sciences, whereas Great Britain and northern European countries prioritize life sciences, such as clinical medicine, biomedicine, and biology, over the physico-chemical disciplines. In the United States, earth sciences and space sciences enjoyed the highest productivity from the 1980s to the mid-1990s; in 1996 biomedicine took the lead, and in 2003, mathematics. Physical and chemical sciences did not play a significant role. In the former Soviet Union and today's Russia, by contrast, physical and chemical sciences occupied the leading position in scientific productivity. Until Abstracts 187 most recently, earth sciences and space sciences also demonstrated high productivity in Russia. The distinctive peculiarity of our country lies in the extraordinarily low productivity in clinical medicine, which on the general global scale occupies the first place in scientific output among other scientific disciplines.