Ethnic minorities in UK science: a bibliometric approach

摘要

This paper seeks to establish the degree of presence and potential impact of ethnic minority scientists on UK science. It does this by examining their published outputs (present in SCI). Ethnic minority researchers were identified and classed within seven distinct groups based on their surname. A fractional count of their papers was used to establish which fields they research into, what types of research they conduct (from basic to applied) and what is the potential impact of their work (citations to journal). Key findings suggest that in the last 20 years the proportion of ethnic-authored papers almost doubled, Chinese were the group which contributed most papers, ethnic minorities are best represented in engineering and technology, physics and chemistry and they tend to publish in applied journals with potential impact factor lower than mat of non-ethnic authors.