In an earlier post, Baybers quipped about the inability of the Muslim world to produce a single scientific journal of any merit. Writing in Physics Today Pervez Hoodbhoy makes a similar point about the sorry state of secular (and particularly scientific) scholarship in the Muslim world.
A useful, if imperfect, indicator of scientific output is the number of published scientific research papers, together with the citations to them. Table 1 shows the output of the seven most scientifically productive Muslim countries for physics papers, over the period from 1 January 1997 to 28 February 2007, together with the total number of publications in all scientific fields. A comparison with Brazil, India, China, and the US reveals significantly smaller numbers. A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia2 showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (For more on the OECD, see http://www.oecd.org.) Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world’s science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US NSF records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.3
The situation may be even grimmer than the publication numbers or perhaps even the citation counts suggest. Assessing the scientific worth of publications—never an easy task—is complicated further by the rapid appearance of new international scientific journals that publish low-quality work. Many have poor editorial policies and refereeing procedures. Scientists in many developing countries, who are under pressure to publish, or who are attracted by strong government incentives, choose to follow the path of least resistance paved for them by the increasingly commercialized policies of journals. Prospective authors know that editors need to produce a journal of a certain thickness every month. In addition to considerable anecdotal evidence for these practices, there have been a few systematic studies. For example,4 chemistry publications by Iranian scientists tripled in five years, from 1040 in 1998 to 3277 in 2003. Many scientific papers that were claimed as original by their Iranian chemist authors, and that had been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, had actually been published twice and sometimes thrice with identical or nearly identical contents by the same authors. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily detected by any reasonably careful referee.
The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.
5 comments ↓
Pretty suss figures, really. For example, given that India has a population in the same league as all Muslims countries combined, it isn’t surprising that its paper output is in the same league. And given that graduates in poor countries tend to go to rich countries to get work - especially pure research work - it would be much more interesting to know the religion of authors of papers, rather than their nationality.
I like what Antish wrote, also - basing the facts on religion as well would indicate whether the anti-intellectual culture suggested by the excerpt is due to Islam itself or (more likely) other factors - access? quality / standards? cultural?
I would also say this is the same old banter we’ve all heard before - “Muslims are lazy people! Look at Jewish scholars! Everywhere! Where are the Muslim scholars? Like in the past with ibn Sina, etc…” Sometimes makes me wonder whether they’re honestly advocating education or just encouraging scholarly competition for ego’s sake.
no there is another point to the argument, scholars or scientist put their finding in well established journals, instead of wasting their finding on something that would not hold up the credibility of their argument.
Research is not based on faith, their are a number of Muslim scholars around the world that do not like to publicieses their background, unlike you guys said the Jewish scholars who publicieses their faith in every line of their research.
The brain drain is a large part of it. There is no shortage of Muslim scholars and researchers in the West but the problem is they must leave to become great researchers and scholars because the culture in the Muslim countries just doesn’t support this sort of thing.
There is no dearth of talent among Muslims, we the Muslims who taught the world about science based on our holy Scripture “Quran”. Alhamdulilah even today if we work with perseverance, we can prove the world that we are the best.
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