Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Who is doing the research?


Google came out with this "google trends" search tool, that enables you to look at the popularity of certain search terms and their geographic location. Just for fun I searched things like "siRNA" ,"stem cell", "microarray" etc... Interrestingly you can figure out this way what technologies are rising or declinning in popularity, but also which cities are most active in research. If you look at the top ten, you'll find obvious ones like LaJolla, or Boston. But to my surprise Seoul, Singapour, Taipei and Beijing consistantly appear in the list. If this is a real trend, expect much more research and discoveries coming from the Far East in the years to come... Just check the regional searches for siRNA:
1. South Korea


2. Taiwan


3. Singapore


4. Israel


5. India


6. Switzerland


7. United States


8. Japan


9. Germany


10. Denmark
(PS- the graph shows "world cup" stats... talk about hockey stick!!!)


2 comments:

Bayman said...

Could it be that these countries are simply more reliant on google for their scientific information, or generally more web-savvy, rather than actually more active in science?

Anonymous Coward said...

It would be nice to have that functionality in pubmed.