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This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Fanpu (ID: fanpu2019), author: Zhou Shuyi

A new report shows that Japanese scientific research is falling out of the top ranks. The number of doctoral students has been decreasing year after year, the treatment of young researchers is low, the pressure is high, and the basic research environment is deteriorating... All of this must start with a reform.

Japan's scientific research influence has fallen again and again, and many key indicators related to scientific research output have fallen out of the top ten in the world. The Japanese Science and Technology Indicators 2023 report released recently by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) clearly shows the above conclusions.

According to the report, Japan has the third-largest number of researchers in the world, behind China and the United States, but its large team has not produced commensurate results. Taking the top 10% of the world's high-cited papers as an example, Japan's annual publication volume was surpassed by South Korea and Spain in last year's report, ranking twelfth; in this report, it was surpassed by Iran, ranking thirteenth, falling to an all-time low.

This self-exposure of its short report is really surprising. After all, Japan is perceived by outsiders as having the most top scientists in Asia-it is the only Asian country in the top 10 with the most Nobel laureates in the world. Why is Japanese scientific research in such a state now?

Japan's scientific research is "hollowing out" three feet of ice, not a cold day. Statistics from the Japan Institute of Science, Technology and Academic Policy (NISTEP) show that Japan's scientific research influence has declined significantly over the past 20 years.

Countries/regions with the highest number of all papers, top10% and 1% papers (natural sciences, fractional counting). Source: According to the top 10% papers cited by NISTEP, in the three periods of 1999 - 2001,2009 - 2011 and 2019 - 2021, the average number of papers published annually in Japan was 4443,4355 and 3767 respectively, showing a downward trend; the global proportion was 6%, 3.8% and 2% respectively, ranking from the fourth to the sixth and then to the thirteenth, with a significant decline. The share of papers cited in the top 1% has fallen from 4.5% 20 years ago to 1.7% now, and the share of total papers has also fallen from 8.8% to 3.8%.

Changes in the proportion of papers in the whole field, top 10% and top 1% in major countries (fractional counting method, 3-year moving average). The number of citations uses data up to the end of 2022. The Top 10% and Top 1% papers are extracted from each of the 22 research areas, so papers that do not fit into a particular area will not be counted. Masatsura Igami, co-author of the NISTEP report and director of NISTEP's Center for Science and Technology Foresight and Indicators, said,"The current research environment in Japan is not ideal and unsustainable. Work must be done to improve the research environment. He argues that "the productivity of Japanese researchers has not actually decreased. But the research environment in other countries has improved too much over the past few decades. "

China is such an "other country"-its research output has grown rapidly over the past 20 years, in sharp contrast to Japan. Compared with 1999 - 2001 and 2019 - 2021, the annual number of highly cited papers published in China (top 10% cited) rose from 1493 to 54405, an increase of 35.4 times, and the global proportion increased from 2% to 28.9%, jumping from 10th to 1st.

The decline of Japan's scientific research ability is actually not news. As early as 2016, Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Nobel laureate, pointed out that Japan's young researchers are decreasing, scientific research funds are insufficient, and scientific research is "hollowing out." He worries deeply about japan's tendency to be industrialist and ignore basic research, arguing that the word "useful" is harming society. Since 2003, there has been a long-term downward trend in the number of doctoral candidates in Japan, while the number of in-service doctoral candidates has continued to rise, reaching 41.7%. In recent years, the trend of young Japanese researchers eager for quick success has risen, and scandals such as Haruko Kobokata's fraud have also emerged.

Number of new doctoral students enrolled in Japan over the years, percentage of those pursuing in-service doctoral degrees over the years. Source: NISTEP Although Japanese scientists have repeatedly won Nobel Prizes, there is a lag in the selection of awards, reflecting the scientific research standards of the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000, the average age of Japan's 20 Nobel laureates has been 70 years, and the average age of groundbreaking achievements is 41 years, an average difference of 29 years. Of the 20 winners, only Shinya Yamanaka won the prize for his work in this century (2003).

Distribution of Japanese Nobel Prize winners since 2000 when they achieved groundbreaking achievements. The academic community has many explanations for the decline in research standards. Among them, the mainstream view is that a series of problems arising from the reform of "corporatization of national universities", which began in 2004, have damaged Japan's scientific research ability.

Nominal value of R&D expenditure in universities in major countries, based on OECD PPP data. Source: NISTEP National University is the main force of Japan's scientific research output, and the reform of "National University Corporation" enables it to obtain independent legal personality, get rid of the direct control of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and realize partial privatization.

The reform was the result of many factors: at that time, Japan's aging population led to a shortage of school-age population, competition for college students intensified, some schools faced a shortage of students and were on the verge of bankruptcy; the economy fell into a long-term downturn after the bubble burst, and government finances faced greater pressure. In 1999, Obuchi's government set a goal of reducing the number of civil servants by 25% within 10 years. At that time, there were 125,000 faculty members in the national university, all of whom were national civil servants. Therefore, the reform of corporate governance was naturally put on the agenda.

The original intention of the reform is to improve the "autonomy" and "autonomy" of national universities, so as to make them "full of personality" and "charming." Specific measures include abolishing the establishment of civil servants for university teachers, establishing a mid-term evaluation system, reducing government funding, etc. As soon as the proposal was introduced, it met with strong resistance from the National University. After several debates and compromises, on July 16, 2003, the National University Corporate Law was officially promulgated and officially implemented since April 1, 2004.

Since then, Japan's funding for national universities has been reduced by 1% a year, from 1.24 trillion yen in 2004 to 1.08 trillion yen in 2022. By 2019, public spending on higher education in Japan will account for only 0.5% of GDP (0.9% in the United States).

According to Yi Shen's analysis, insufficient funds are an important reason for the decline in Japanese scientific research. Over the past two decades, research spending in universities has risen 80 percent in the United States and Germany, 40 percent in France, fourfold in South Korea and tenfold in China, according to the report. Japan, by contrast, grew by only 10%.

Hokkaido University, which has been established for more than 100 years and has produced Nobel Prize winner Akira Suzuki in chemistry, announced in 2016 that it was preparing to lay off a large number of employees under the pressure of successive cuts in funding. Even if Hokkaido University meets the designated teaching and research targets every year, the Japanese government will continue to cut higher education funding in the future, so it will need to reduce personnel costs by another 14.4% within six years, equivalent to the salary of 205 full-time professors.

Studies show that between 2006 and 2009, more than half of state universities were unable to make up the difference with tuition fees and affiliated hospital revenues against the backdrop of reduced government financial support. Even with increasing "competitive funding," about 40 per cent of national universities are still facing financial difficulties.

Academic career prospects are bleak. Years of cutbacks in funding have hit new researchers hardest, eager to get a job. In the face of increasing competition, it is increasingly difficult to find a teaching position, and the positions found are increasingly unstable. According to a 2015 survey, 35% of national universities do not consider filling posts after professors retire. Statistics show that the proportion of young teachers under the age of 35 in all national universities decreased from 13.4 per cent in 2004 to 9.8 per cent in 2013, but the proportion of short-term teaching staff increased from 52.9 per cent in 2007 to 73.5 per cent in 2013.

In Japan, seniority is prevalent in research teams, with senior researchers controlling research direction and resources, and newcomers usually playing only supporting roles. The continued tightening of resources makes it harder for young people to have a day to rise. Seeing peers struggling with seniority may dissuade young scientists from pursuing careers in science, he says. The number of doctoral students in Japan has declined by 21 percent over the past two decades, he said. Attracting doctoral students with more experience than undergraduate and master's students into the laboratory will be the key to improving Japan's scientific research influence. "The research environment in Japan has not improved compared to the past, and career prospects in academia will only grow dimmer as universities increasingly offer short-term positions for researchers. "

While reducing the amount of direct grants, the corporatization reform also introduced a large amount of "competitive funding" as compensation. But this creates a new problem: due to lack of funds, researchers have to deal with various assessments to compete for "competitive funding," which is a serious administrative diversion from the time actually spent on scientific research.

According to a 2020 survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the proportion of actual research time spent by Japanese university researchers fell from 47% to 33% between 2002 and 2018. In April 2023, a survey of 980 hospital doctors at 81 universities in Japan showed that, on average, 50% of lecturers, nearly 65% of assistant professors spent less than five hours a week on research, and 15% of assistant professors were unable to carry out research at all.

In addition, due to the financial shortage, the school is seriously understaffed, and many unrelated chores have to be done by researchers themselves, which makes the already poor research time worse. "From visa documents for foreign lab members to calls from landlords saying your students are behind on rent-as long as you are the principal investigator, you have to manage everything. Haruka Ono of Toyohashi University of Technology told Nature. She launched a survey that found that insufficient research time was a major cause of dissatisfaction among Japanese research recruits, who thought administrative tasks were too onerous.

Wataru Iwasaki, a computational biologist at the University of Tokyo who represents new research at the Science Council of Japan, said he wanted additional support staff, including administrators, lab technicians and business specialists, to allow researchers to focus on their research. At present, Japanese universities have an average of one support staff for every 20 researchers, significantly lagging behind other major countries. Ono adds that more support staff can better support newcomers to conduct independent research and help break down seniority barriers.

In addition, self-financing has also caused heavy pressure on weak universities, and the Matthew effect has become more obvious. Some famous comprehensive universities received 26.9 billion yen in external funding in the first year of incorporation, while some local national universities or educational universities focusing on liberal arts received less than 100 million yen in external funding in the first year. In order to win more funds, universities have to respond to the government's "baton" by reducing the proportion of basic research and moving closer to applied research. Japanese academic circles have shown a trend of "industrialization" and "hollowing out." "University researchers are being asked to play a more versatile role in teaching, industry collaboration and community engagement. In medicine, young researchers need to take on more clinical work to keep hospital revenue. "It's good for universities to give back to society in many ways, but it takes time away from dedicated research," says Ishin. "

In order to get out of the predicament, the Japanese government has made a series of repair measures. In 2021, for example, Japan unveiled a 10 trillion yen ($75 billion) university funding plan. The government-funded fund, which will start operating in fiscal 2024, aims to emulate the model of private research institutions in the United States, investing in stocks and bonds with an expected annual return of 3%. Participating universities are expected to receive funding for up to 25 years, officials said. In September 2023, Tohoku University became the only candidate for the program.

University corporate reform, or the general trend, but the pros and cons of gains and losses, at this stage can not be conclusive. As the OECD noted in a 2004 report-"corporatization cannot be said to be wrong, but it cannot be said to be right. "At the beginning of the reform drive, Yuko Harayama, emeritus professor of engineering at Tohoku University, wrote that there were two paths to corporate reform: Big-bang (radicalism) and Gradualism (gradualism). Perhaps, as these two words suggest, the absence of a "Big-bang" in Japan's scientific output is not because researchers are not working hard enough-because both research and reform take more time.

Primary reference sources

[1] https://nistep.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/2000006

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03290-1

[3] https://ajmc.jp/news/2023/04/18/5051/

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00666-1

[5] https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/houjin/1418116.htm

[6] https://www.airitilibrary.com/Article/Detail/P20220316001-202201-202203230012-202203230012-91-114

[7] https://iss.ndl.go.jp/books/R000000004-I023750713-00

[8] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/267/

[9] "Japanese Science and Technology Indicators 2023"，NISTEP RESEARCH MATERIAL No. 328, National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, Tokyo. DOI：https://doi.org/10.15108/rm328e

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