FOREST GENOMICS IN CANADA AND OTHER LEADING COUNTRIES

Project - Benchmarking of Forest Genomics in Canada and Other Leading Countries (1992-2003)
Client - Canadian Forest Service (CFS)

Description - The Canadian Forest Service (CFS) of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) mandated Science-Metrix to perform an analysis of forest genomics to study the evolution of the field at the Canadian and international levels, and to benchmark the output of Canada against that of other leading countries in the field. Science-Metrix is uniquely positioned to conduct this study since it has experience in the bibliometric definition used to measure multidisciplinary fields such as forest genomics, which lies at the intersection of silviculture, entomology, microbiology and genomics.

Science-Metrix provided a comprehensive picture of the field including precise statistics on the scientific output of the countries included in the study. Forest genomics is a niche within the area of genomics, whose scientific production accounted for about 1% of world output in genomics in 2003. Scientific output in forest genomics between 1992 and 2003 has grown substantially, with the number of papers per year increasing from 257 in 1992 to 542 in 2003, an increase of 110%. Based on multi-criteria benchmarking for the 12-year period studied, Canada , whose commercial forests rank third in terms of worldwide importance and cover about 235 million hectares, is ranked in second place behind France . In terms of scientific output based on its published papers Canada ranks high: 2nd for number of papers; 3rd for number of papers per capita; 1st for specialization. The factor in the multicriteria benchmarking that stops Canada from being in first place overall is the relatively lower ranking (11th) for citations to its papers.

The results of the study were presented at the Canadian Forest Genomics Symposium organized by CSF (NRCan) and Genome Canada in Ottawa in September 2004.

STUDY REPORT

	Campbell D. and Côté G. 2004.
	Benchmarking of Forest Genomics in Canada and Other Leading Countries - 1992-2003. Prepared for the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) by Science-Metrix, 28 pages.
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