Why is it that Belgium comes after the Netherlands in science development?

Corey Houghton
By Corey Houghton
Questions and Answers

Why do the Dutch do better in scientific development than Belgium, and why does the Democratic Republic of Congo and the like hardly move?

I was reading a table on #SJR : Scientific Journal Rankings# yesterday.

Belgium No. 21. The Netherlands No. 14. Democratic Republic of Congo No. 174.

In h index: 545 – 428 – 27

How can we explain such a gap because politics and economics do not help me? (China is not a democracy and yet it comes second on the SJR list. Saudi Arabia has money and yet it comes in at No. 48).

Asker: Steve, 16 years old

Answer

Hello Steve,

One should always be very careful with such “performance” figures. But if you want to compare Belgium and the Netherlands in terms of the number of citable documents that have appeared in scientific journals and the number of citations, you also have to take into account the number of inhabitants.

SJR compare provides approximately 23,000 citable scientific documents for Belgium and 41,000 for the Netherlands. If you divide that by the population (10.4 million for Belgium and 16.8 for the Netherlands), you get 2.2 and 2.4 respectively.
The h-index is 428 for Belgium and 545 for the Netherlands. If you divide that by the population, you get 41 for Belgium and 32 for the Netherlands.
Belgium is now doing better than the Netherlands in terms of h-index and almost as well in terms of the total number of citable documents.
China has the “advantage” of having a huge population while Saudi Arabia has none at all. Very poor countries (read: poorly governed) such as the DRC hardly do any scientific research. If you were to compare all rich countries, you would see a number of outliers. Eg. in Europe, the Scandinavian countries score better. This is undoubtedly related to better government science policy and, above all, the allocation of more resources for scientific research. But there is no big gap between Belgium and the Netherlands.

Answered by

prof. Dr. Luke Bouwens

Biomedical Sciences

Why is it that Belgium comes after the Netherlands in science development?

Free University of Brussels
Pleinlaan 2 1050 Ixelles
http://www.vub.ac.be/

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