The level of Japan's science and technology research has steadily improved in recent years to equal that of Western industrialized nations, and now creative research and development must be promoted to keep up the progress, the Education Ministry said Friday in its 1997 white paper on education.
According to the report, which was submitted to a Cabinet meeting by Education Minister Nobutaka Machimura, Japan is mostly through with its catchup stage of adopting and improving foreign basic technologies and is entering the new phase of strengthening original research and development.
The report, featuring scholarly research in the first chapter, stresses that such efforts are needed to deal with the hollowing out of domestic industries, as well as with global environmental and food problems. According to the report, the number of Japanese scholarly papers in chemistry, engineering and science listed in international databases, such as INSPEC of the Institution of Electric Engineers and Chemical Abstracts, ranked second after the United States, making up about 10 percent of the total in each field. In the area of medicine, the number of papers listed by Japan ranked third after the U.S. and Britain.
The report says the number of times Japanese scholarly reports listed on the American database Science Citation Index were accessed ranked second or third in some areas, including in agriculture, chemistry, biology and material science. The total level of such access rose about 30 percent from 15 years ago, the report says.