Numbers
Money, contracts, pranks and Covid
Computer-generated nonsense-articles, and Covid-19 researchers hogging their data: We look at some figures from the world of research
Illustration: Bodara
13.5
billion dollars more for research and development – an increase of nine percent. That’s what US President Joe Biden asked Congress to provide in May 2021. Of these monies, USD 4.4 billion should flow into basic research, and USD 6.3 billion into applied research.
55
hours or more: that’s how much almost a fifth of corresponding authors work every week, according to a survey conducted by the OECD published in May 2021. Only just over half of them actually have an indefinite contract.
14%
of the total of 5,900 research articles published on COVID-19 between December 2019 and April 2020 shared their data, according to a study published in April 2021. “It can be deduced that data sharing is not a common practice, even in health emergencies”, write the authors.
75
out of every million articles in the computer sciences are utterly nonsensical, according to a systematic study of 19 publishing houses conducted by two French researchers. These articles, which are utterly devoid of content, have been generated by SCIgen, which was designed as a prank by three doctoral students in 2005.
