How does Canada’s publication rate for scientific articles compare to that of its peers?
Canada has a high public share of R&D financing spent by university researchers, something that encourages relatively more publications. Some of Canada’s peer countries, on the other hand, have a higher share of industry funding for R&D, which seems to encourage patenting over publishing. Canada’s growing rate of patenting during the 1990s may therefore have been helped, paradoxically, by the simultaneous reduction in university funding. While Canadian universities were experiencing cutbacks, the high-technology boom was gathering momentum, encouraging qualified scientists and engineers to move from academia to industry. So although Canada saw a reduction in publications, Canadian industry became leaders at adopting and patenting new digital general-purpose information and communications technologies.
