Canada leads the world in research impact, shows study

April 2006 – Canadian researchers are making a bigger impact with their research dollars than researchers from any other country.

That’s according to a January 2006 article in The FASEB Journal which ranked the research contributions of various countries based on the number of articles published in the world’s top 50 biomedical journals. The FASEB Journal is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Canadian researchers ranked first in the world when the study’s authors looked at the number of top scientific articles published relative to the amount of money spent on research. Canadian researchers ranked second only to the U.S, and well ahead of Western Europe, when it came to the number of articles published relative to the size of the population.

“This shows that Canadian researchers are very productive, even when compared with the much larger research community in the U.S.” says Dr. Michael Wosnick, executive director of the National Cancer Institute of Canada. “We may not always have the budgets our colleagues in other countries have, but we have developed a knack for getting the biggest bang for our research buck. Canadians should be exceedingly proud of the stellar quality and the cost-effectiveness of the research they fund. It’s making a difference.”

The study looked at articles published between 1995 and 2002 in the world’s top 50 biomedical journals – including journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study’s authors say that Canadian researchers are a “surprisingly positive example” of an efficient and effective research community.

The outstanding contributions of Canadian researchers were previously recognized in a study published in the European Journal of Cancer in January 2003.

That earlier study looked specifically at the impact factor of clinical, or patient-oriented, cancer research. The impact factor was based on the number of times that clinical cancer research articles published between 1995 and 1999 were cited over the next 2 years in major scientific journals. When the clinical cancer research was rated according to this method, articles published by Canadian cancer researchers were again tops in the world.

But Canadian clinical cancer researchers are not resting on past laurels - Canada continues to make a tremendous impact with its clinical research. In 2005, two clinical trials supported by the National Cancer Institute of Canada were rated among the top 10 treatment advances in cancer that year. The clinical trials – in breast cancer and lung cancer – have already dramatically changed how people with cancer are being treated around the world.

Last modified on: 30 January 2009