The statistics were obtained by searching and counting the registered papers in internationally prominent abstracting databases in science, engineering and medicine: INSPEC, CA (Chemical Abstracts), COMPENDEX and EMBASE, from 1976 to 1993 in 29 classified fields. Target countries for the survey were the following seven: Japan, U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia (USSR) and Canada.

As NACSIS conducted a similar survey in 1987 and published the results, we planed the new survey with an identical framework in order to compare the present situation with that of nearly ten years ago. In the previous survey, the number of papers from Japan was found to be second after the U.S. or third after the U.S. and USSR in almost all fields of science, engineering and medicine, and Japan's growth rate of paper counts during the period from 1976 to 1985 was the highest of the seven countries.<2>

According to the new survey, similar trends have continued from 1976 through to 1993. While Japan's counts have continued to grow strongly, USSR's (Russia) counts have fallen remarkably in these years due to the collapse of the union. This moved Japan into second after the U.S. in 1993 in all fields except three medical fields. Throughout the period, Japan's share in the world total in each field increased 1.7 times on average, and more than doubled in some. As a result, Japan has attained a share of over 10% in many fields in 1990s, most of which were less than 10% in 1970s. However, the paper counts adjusted by the population of the country, as a way of normalization, show quite a different picture; Japan is at the top of the world in three fields in chemistry, and is 6th in eight fields of medicine and physics, and there are great differences of the figures between the surveyed databases.

The statistics were published in a booklet, and a preliminary analysis has appeared as a journal paper.<3,4> The authors are continuing to conduct further analyses, examining other statistical indexes for comparison and correlation with the paper counts.

References
<1> "A study of international comparison of scientific research activities based on statistical analysis of abstracting and citation indexing databases (Chief investigator: Masamitsu NEGISHI)," subsidized by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (MONBUSHO), FY1995.
<2> Negishi, M., "Research activities in Japan and Japanese articles registered in western databases," D. Monch et al., eds. "Japanese information in science, technology and commerce: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference," Amsterdam, IOS Press, ISBN 90-5199-022-7, 1990. p.184-197.
<3> "An International comparison of the number of scientific papers: Trends of scientific paper publication in science, engineering and medicine, 1976-1993," NACSIS, 1996, 34p.
<4> Negishi, M.,"An International comparison of the number of scientific papers: A summary of the results and viewpoints for further analysis," JOHO KANRI (Journal of Information Processing and Management ), Vol.39, No.4, p.245-257 (1996).