Evolution of R&D in Kazakhstan

I have decided to make a quick analysis of R&D in Kazakhstan because I think it is going to be more interesting for you. I think you all have an idea what's going in Spain or Navarre :).
We start with GDP of Kazakhstan to correlate it with R&D later. In 2013 Kazakhstan was on 45 place in the world with GDP 203 USD billions. It's almost 7 times less than GDP of Spain. But for a country with 16 millions of people it is not so bad.

What is up with the spending on R&D? Here the situation is even worse...

So, maybe not only GDP counts, also the percentage is important... By the way, you can notice the decrease in GDP and spending in 2009, which was caused by economic crisis in 2008.
Now we know how it is with money. I think that spending on R&D for whole country is less than for Navarre only. Yeah, the absolute value is increasing, but still is very small.
If you don't have money you don't have researchers. The next graph demonstrates that.

Actually, it is not that awful. There are 1200 researchers per 1 million. When in Spain and Russia approximately 3000 researchers. So, I respect these people. With much less money they continue to work. But can we call it R&D? I don't think so. Without equipment, facilities and money to collaborate with others there is no research. And number of publications shows explicitly...

Only 725 papers in 2012. It's like nothing comparing with USA. Some optimists would say: "You have increasing number of papers..." maybe. But it's still almost zero - 0.02% of total papers in the world.

What is the main problem? I think there are many reasons for that. First of all, it is a poor financing. It is impossible to obtain results without money. Second, I would say the quality of level index, which is worse than in prosperous countries. So many researchers are just working in another countries, where they have money to investigate and live. Next problem, very important one is how the government treats researchers, how stimulates them. Now it is not enough that you are smart and willing to work. You have to honey people above. So a lot of your energy goes to that. Even better if you have some siblings in the government. You don't have to work then...

In 1994 the program "Bolashak" has started, which gives grants to talented students to study abroad. Most of them are winners of international Olympiads in physics, mathematics, chemistry and etc. More than 10000 grantees have received degrees, some of them in Universities like Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, MIT. But what happened to them when they had to return? They didn't know where they can work! The government proposed them jobs, which don't even require a degree! How they supposed to work in low paying job? Of course many of them decided to do not return. 

What is the conclusion? Not only GDP is important. The government has to create an environment for researchers. Or they will find another place...

I won't talk about Russia, also former Soviet union country, which also has a catastrophic situation with a science. But I hope it will change soon.

"Biggest fraud in physics in the last 50 years..."

This example of scientific fraud quite surprised me. I've never thought that it can be so big,
"successful" and last so much time...

I'm talking about German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who was famous in the field of semiconductors, until he was caught. He claimed to make breakthroughs in semiconductors, which could have change completely the industry. Before he was caught he received several awards as young successful researcher with a bright future. Of course, later all rewards were revoked.

In his papers he claimed that he was able to use organic materials instead of silicon and other conventional materials. Later he also declared that he built a transistor on the molecular scale, using thin layer of organic molecules. This was a huge breakthrough with grand opportunities of building organic electric circuits. Unfortunately, all of it was a lie.

How he was caught? Of course many researcher were trying to repeat his "extraordinary" experiments and obtain the same results. But what a surprise - none of them could do it. This attracted additional attention to his papers, and finally Lydia Sohn, the researcher from Princeton University, pointed out that in his graphics the noise is identical for different temperatures. He explained by mistakenly submitting the same graph twice. But it was too late.

After investigation 16 of 24 misconducts were proved. Very convenient for him he didn't use any notebooks and all electronic copies were erased due to a small space in hard drive of his computer. Poor guy, he had to publish results and then erase them from computer...

More interestingly, all coauthors were freed from the scientific misconduct. This started a discussions of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers.

He finished his career with a such shame. After all investigations and proves of his scientific frauds, his doctoral degree was revoked and he lost rights to be peer reviewer and apply for funds in 8 years.

And now I'm thinking how he was going to explain that no one could repeat his experiments? What he was thinking of? Also how he could last so long and publish 36 papers in such famous scientific journals like Nature, APL, Physical Review, Science...

Why we put the references?

To be honest, I don't have more reasons than we have said in the class... Namely:
1. To show your erudition.
2. Avoid plagiarism, divide your work and work of others.
3. Following from the previous: divide your current work and your previous work. State what you have improved, why it's important.
4. Show respect to people you like (contrary, you can do not put a reference of work of person you do not like).
5. Demonstrate your collaboration with someone, again, very close to the previous one.
6. To help the reader to understand your work, by recommending to read more about this topic.
7. Avoid repeating, make the text more laconic, without excessive sentences.
8. Following from 6-7, explain your idea by making analogies with previous works.

I think that's it. I can't think another reasons to put references. These ones I used by myself, when I was writing the paper. Maybe I forgot about some reason I used.

Bad graph, good graph...

Here are the examples I found. Nothing special, standard mistakes in graph design. Let's start with an example of bad graph.

Of course, it's only my opinion, maybe you will think contrarily. But why I think this is a bad graph? Because it is quite difficult for me to understand. In my opinion, this is the first and main criteria for an illustration. Yeah, after 2 or 3 minutes it became more clear, what is going on, but still I had a strange feeling that something left unclear. For example, this diversity of colors, mixing in the center not helping, not at all... They are just creating a chaos in my mind :). Besides, some information is impossible, well not impossible, but hard to obtain from this graph - what is the distribution of children who changed their religion.

The good graph:

Obviously it's a different type of graph and cannot be compared directly, but I like that it's clean, easy to understand. The scale is the same for whole graph, the size of letters is appropriate. The space is used well, without blank regions. 

So, these are my examples of good and bad illustration. 

Number of Journals vs Impact Factor in Biology

Here is the graphic, which illustrates the number of Journals as a function of theirs Impact factor.
Basically, it clearly demonstrates that we discussed in the class last Tuesday. Tens of Journals have IF less than 1 and only two have more than 10.
Let's see how it is in the other fields...

Reference manager

I have already written a little bit about the reference manager I use, but I will add some thing I like in Mendeley. Mendeley as you know is a free reference manager, which allows you to add your articles, articles you read and cite. As you are adding new articles, books into to your collection, you can create different folders, groups for articles, depending on their topic. I found this very useful when your library starts to grow - you have more ways to organize everything. Next time you want to find some article and you remember only the topic and name of the author you don't have to scan all papers of this author, you can just search in this folder.
Another feature I love is the citation plugin in Microsoft word. By typing the name of the author and choosing from the list of his papers you can create your reference list in just a few minutes... Also, it will be already formatted according to the standards of the scientific journal(although not all them are presented in Mendeley, but you can create your own template).
What else? Probably I will start to share my collection to my colleagues, because sometimes you need to share some paper, or tell them what interesting paper you are reading now.
So, I don't know if I will change the reference manager in future, but for this moment I'm totally happy with Mendeley.

Formulation of the problem - key to the solution?

Well, I'm a little bit late, but I think I'll extend our conversation in the class. Probably, I didn't get the topic of the class completely right, but I think it's OK. I'll talk about an important thing in the career of every young scientist, or just student, worker, etc.

To begin with, I should comment that I do find this kind of questions interesting. It's like, you always hear stuff like - "to have deep knowledge you have to read a lot..." But you never ask yourself, if you are doing it (reading) right (btw, it is also very interesting topic, maybe we will talk about it later in the class), or how do you know if your way to find the required information in easiest and, more important, quickest way. So in this post I'll try to answer to myself this question: how I am looking for the information I need?

First thing I realized, it is the great importance of the formulation of the problem you have. You are not looking for random scientific article or book, or article in the Internet. You are looking for the information related to your current study. When I started to work with articles I was completely lost. So many articles I will never be able to read... But then I realized that I need to read only 10-15 articles, related to my current topic, which is obviously doable. When I´ve read some of them I had more clear idea what I should learn next. I started to formulate my question in very clear way. And generally, when I have question formulated I am opening the book...  Of course, it´s just a beginning and I can sometimes get lost, but I think I will find my way every time faster. To sum up, before I look for something I ask myself: what I am looking for?

Another thing is what kind of sources we use to look for the information? I found the references in the articles very useful. Keeping in mind, that we already have an idea of what we are looking for, the process really speeds up. From only a title of the article you can decide if it is worth to look or not. Maybe sometimes you can miss something important, but I think this method pays off. Moreover, I think the articles of other authors are supposed just to give you the ideas, inspire you. I read in the speech of Richard Hamming the reason why some scientists never do something novel or some kind of discovery. According to his speech, it is because the are reading... too much! They know so many things that they are never able to make something new. They are not starting something, because they think they know what the answer is. And the young scientist without experience can do this because his mind is free from the limitations. Sorry for this off-topic.

And for the end of this post, I want to mention the tools I use to find the information I need. Of course it is search engines, like Google, Bing. Also databases like Web of knowledge. Sometimes I can look in the databases of the peer-review Journals. Having the references makes it's much easier to find articles. And I can't imagine my life without tools I mentioned.

Also I would like to mention the reference organizer. It really saves a lot of time. For example in Mendeley, you can save articles you use and then add them to your reference list in just 2 clicks! I remember the times when I was doing it manually, it was a real disaster.