The number of academic papers written in Greece rose sharply between 1993-2008. The rate of increase was among the highest in the European Union and the 30 member-states of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These findings are according to a survey by Greece’s National Documentation Centre (EKT) released on Monday.
Greece also performed well in terms of the number of articles published relative to its population, with 820 papers per one million inhabitants in 2007. This ranked the country 17th among OECD member states in 2008 and greatly improved on its position in 1993. It surpassed publications relative to populations in Japan, Italy and Spain.
This is based on the data for some 92,456 papers generated by 70 bodies in Greece. It includes universities, technical educational institutes, research centres supervised by the general secretary for research and technology, other public-sector research bodies, state-sector health bodies, private-sector health bodies, organisations supervised by the Defence Ministry, museums, banks, various other state organisations and private organisations.
The statistical processing of the data was carried out using specialised software developed by EKT. This showed an increase in both the number of times Greek papers are referenced by other scientists and academics worldwide. It also includes the percentage of publications with references to the sum of Greek publications.
For example, in the five-year period between 2004-2008, there a total of 43,447 Greek papers published, of which 26,224 (60.3%) were referenced 165,981 times. In the five-year period between 1993-1997, by contrast, there were a total of 16,869 Greek papers published and 7,919 of these (46.9%) were referenced 35,044 times.
The highest percentage reference rates in 2004-2008 were achieved by private health organisations (69.4%) and research centres supervised by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (68.4%).
The highest number of publications were authored within universities or with the participation of universities. Universities employ the largest number of researchers and accounted for 80.8% of the total.
Papers written by a university or with universities also accounted for the largest number of references of Greek papers (76.2% of the total) between 1993-2008, followed by General Secretariat for Research and Technology research centres (22.8%) and state health organisations (12.7%).
The natural sciences account for 51.4% of papers published by Greek authors in 2004-2008. The fields of medicine and health sciences record the fastest rate of increase in terms of the number of papers published and an ever-increasing share of the total, which came to 37.5% in 2004-2008.
Mechanical engineering and technology holds a 23.7% share in the same period while there are few Greek papers in agricultural science, social science and human studies.
The study also records an increase in collaboration between Greek researchers and other research teams abroad, with papers produced collaboratively rising from 47.2% in 1993 to 65% in 2008.
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