Research excellence
In addition to its corporate strengths in life sciences, Scotland benefits from a strong academic base. Higher education investment in research per capita in Scotland is 40 per cent more than the rest of the UK. This is reflected in excellent performance as measured by scientific citations, Research Assessment Exercise outcomes, and a significantly higher proportion of life sciences graduates.
Scotland produces:
- 32.5 per cent of first degrees and 20 per cent of higher degrees in Microbiology
- 14.5 per cent of first degrees in medicine and subjects allied to medicine
- 25.7 per cent of first degrees and 31.3 per cent of higher degrees in veterinary science (Source: HESA 2005 - 2006)
This educational excellence provides us with a large and strong pool of emerging talent which helps support our development as a centre of excellence for life science research.
- We have 57 universities and research institutes, employing over 17,000 research staff, working in life sciences.
- Our academics produce one per cent of all research publications in the world – ranking Scotland third in the world for the number of research publications published per head of population.
- Scotland has one per cent of world citations, compared to 0.8 per cent of publications, and over two per cent of world highly-cited papers
Our universities and institutes actively collaborate with industry, for example, the University of Dundee’s Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT) Consortium involved six pharmaceutical companies in a £15 million kinase research programme.