早上邮箱里收到公司内部转来的一个关于科学研究趋势的材料，感觉很有意思。这则材料谈的是科学研究中的意外发现，据说还不少。英文题目叫：Researchers are surprised by their own findings。

他们用Scopus做了一个搜索，发现在全球每年发表的科研论文里，题目当中包含有Surprise这个词的占0.5%，在过去10年里，3%的作者在科研过程中发现了意外的收获。100个人里有3个，不算太多，但也不算太少了！

据说“意外”收获最多的是经济学、数量经济学和金融领域。我突然想到，今年在牛津培训时，有一课专门讨论Jim Collins 的Level 5型领导，我曾就此专门写过一篇博文（http://www.sciencenet.cn/blog/user_content.aspx?id=21675）。这个研究，就是Jim Collins在研究另外一个课题——“为什么有些公司实现了连续30年的增长，而有些公司只是昙花一现？”时的意外收获。

全文如下：

Researchers are surprised by their own findings

Discovery is the watchword of scholarly research, and new observations serve to propel scientific knowledge ever forward. Yet the lay observer might be interested to learn just how often the authors of research papers are surprised by their own findings. A search of the Scopus database for articles containing the word root ‘surpris*’ in the title, abstract or keywords retrieves almost 6,000 articles published in 2006, more than 0.5% of all articles that year. In fact, looking at this proportion over the last decade, authors appear to be about 3% more surprised by their own research every year!

A disciplinary breakdown of the ‘surprising’ articles identified in 2006 shows that the greatest proportion is published in Economics, Econometrics and Finance (1.25% of articles), while the least are found in the Energy and Engineering fields (0.11% and 0.17%, respectively). Authors in the Agricultural and Biological Sciences are surprised at the average rate of 0.51%.

Researchers should take heart, as one recent example of such a ‘surprising’ research finding was reported by Andrew Fire and Craig Mello in 1998 (1) and led to the award of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It has been cited almost 3,400 times to date.

(1) Fire, A. (1998) “Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans”, Nature, Vol. 391, No. 6669, pp. 806–811.

这个关于科研趋势的报告，是每两个一期的电子杂志。免费。有兴趣的读者，可以上网自己订阅。网址是：http://www.info.scopus.com/researchtrends/

另外一则是关于国家之间科研产出的比较，说明美国科研产出在逐年下降——虽然它还是一个科研强国！这里不全引了，有兴趣的可以自己查看。

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