Research and Development Policies in the Southeast European Countries in Transition: Republic of Croatia

2. Comparative data

We shall take a closer look at this research, because it seems highly relevant for the understanding of the position of Croatia in its surroundings. The scientific field is that of chemistry.

This research appears relevant, especially because out of the eight selected scientific fields (clinical medicine, biomedicine, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, geology, and space research) it is Croatian chemistry that stands above the world average. The authors describe the level of development of these scientific fields in each country covered by the survey.

The level of development of a given scientific field is established by determining its share in the world scientific production. The establishment of the average shares for different scientific fields provides a pattern of relationship typical for the whole world. The same procedure is used to evaluate the scientific output for each individual country. In this way, we can decide whether a country deviates from the world pattern, and, if it does, in which scientific fields this is the case. Equally, we can decide whether a given scientific field is more or less developed than the world average. As far as Croatia is concerned, it was found that it deviates from the world pattern in the field of chemistry, which is considerably more developed than its share in the pattern of world averages. A similar case is that of Croatian mathematics and physics, whose shares are above the world average, but less so than the share of chemistry. We can safely conclude that chemistry is the most developed of the eight scientific fields in Croatia. Thus, the comparison with the other countries is based on the most developed scientific field in the country. This is another important reason to subject the data given by the authors to a closer scrutiny.

To provide an international framework for the analysis, we should first give the statistics of publications in the field of chemistry for the whole world (Table 2).
Table 2. The number of published chemical articles per million inhabitants, 1992-1997.

Rank Country Number/ million

1 Switzerland 182.8

2 Sweden 123.2

3 Israel 105.4

4 The Netherlands 104.6

5 Canada 97.9

6 Germany 96.7

7 United Kingdom 95.3

8 Denmark 89.5

9 France 88.9

10 Belgium 84.4

14 Czech Republic 78.4

17 Slovenia 75.4

21 Hungary 71.9

22 Austria 68.3

27 Bulgaria 43.4

28 Croatia 43.0

29 Poland 42.5

33 Estonia 31.7

35 Latvia 29.6

40 Lithuania 15.3

42 Romania 14.2

The fact that Croatia occupies the 28th place in Table 2 and that its production in the most developed of its scientific fields has been stagnating for a prolonged period of time should stimulate further analyses and a new direction of scientific policy.

Another interesting table in the quoted article is Table 3 given here (modified), with data on the impact of published chemical articles in the countries under analysis.
Table 3. Periodical publications in chemistry, 1995-1996, with average observed citation (AOC)¹ and the average relative citation (ARC)².

Rank Country AOC ARC

1 Austria 2.9 1.08

2 Latvia 1.4 1.05

3 Czech Republic 2.2 1.04

4 Finland 2.9 1.02

5 Slovakia 1.4 0.91

6 Slovenia 2.5 0.89

7 Estonia 2.7 0.88

8 Poland 1.7 0.83

9 Lithuania 1.6 0.81

10 Croatia 1.9 0.79

11 Bulgaria 1.8 0.78

12 Romania 1.2 0.78

13 Hungary 2.5 0.77

1 AOC is the actually observed average citation during three years following the publication of an article.

2 ARC is the ratio between AOC and the citation of the journal in which the article appeared (impact factor). When the ARC = 1, the articles are cited on the average as much as the journals.
Whatever the real meaning of the citation data – about which the debates continue – it is certain that these data shed light on particular relative relations. On the level of citation of the journal in which the articles are published, we can establish whether an article or a group of articles are quoted as much as the journal itself (the journal’s impact factor), or whether they stand above or below this average. This reflects the relevance of these articles for the world scientific community (their readers), who rely on them in their future research and publications.

If this view is accepted, then the average observed citation (AOC) and the average relative citation (ARC) in Table 3 can be taken as measures of relevance of the published text for the world chemical community. The AOC tells us how many times the articles by Croatian chemists published in chemical journals have been quoted according to the ISI database. When the citation figure for different articles is compared with the average number of citations of articles published in such a journal (ARC), we can see that the articles by Croatian authors are cited fewer times on the average than other articles published in the same journals (ARC < 1). It follows from this table that Croatia occupies a place in the bottom part of the table (tenth position out of thirteen). Such comparative data for chemistry point to the conclusion that even in its most developed scientific field, chemistry, Croatia records results that fall below the world average. This conclusion should sound an alarm bell and it requires an urgent and serious analysis of a new direction of scientific research policy.