Labmeeting Blog

Labmeeting gets visits from people all over the world who are searching for answers to questions about biomedical research subjects. The fascinating thing about this is that it means we can look at our Google Analytics board and tell which countries are most interested in the life sciences.

I just measured traffic for a couple weeks in December and ranked countries by the total number of hits.  The result was:
Country   Normalized traffic
1. USA   28
2. UK     5.5
3. India  4.0
4. Germany  3.9
5. Canada   3.1
6. France   2.5
7. China  2.4
8. Japan  2.4
9. Italy  2.3
10. Spain 1.7
11. Israel  1.5
12. Netherlands  1.4
13. Australia  1.3
14. Taiwan  1.2
15. Brazil  1

I don’t think this should raise too many eyebrows.  It’s the usual suspects: countries that are highly developed, highly populous, or both.  But now, let’s re-normalize these hits by the populations I got from the table here.  We get:

1. Israel       130
2. USA        50
3. Canada  50
4. UK   49
5. Netherlands   47
6. Australia   36
7. Taiwan     27
8. Germany  26
9. France     22
10. Spain     22
11. Italy        21
12. Japan    10
13. Brazil     3
14. India      2
15. China    1

A few comments, starting at the bottom. It is probably safe to say that sheer population put China, India, and Brazil into the top 15 in raw traffic numbers; they are countries on the grow in R&D, but they’ve got some catching up to do.

Numbers 8-12 are certainly doing much better than the bottom three; Japan’s per capita Labmeeting traffic is a factor of three higher than Brazil’s.  That being said, they are all countries that we think of as having very strong research science, and yet as a fraction of their populations, they are getting edged out by Taiwan!  Admittedly, size does matter here: Japan obviously has a lot more to throw into R&D in absolute terms than Taiwan does. Still, Australia and Japan have roughly equal income per capita and yet there the contest is not even close.

There is, of course, another explanatory variable here.  What do the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Holland all have in common?  English, of course! (Basically everyone in Holland speaks English, right?) Labmeeting is not multilingual, and it is not surprising that countries where English is spoken by virtually everyone tend to ask more questions about the life sciences in English.  That being said, this is not a trivial finding: English is the lingua franca of the biological sciences, and it is quite interesting to discover that countries like Germany and France, which have traditionally been strong in science, are conducting far fewer searches of the flagship biomedical literature per person.  And kudos to Taiwan for beating them despite a higher language barrier and a lower GDP per capita!

I’ll close by saying that while I doubt anyone is shocked to find the US, UK, and Canada in the top four, the dramatic success of Israel here is quite an upset.  We are surely all aware of the great research that comes out of places like the Weizmann Institute and Technion, but we rarely stop to think just how much good science is coming out of such a tiny country (there are twice as many people in Tokyo alone).  The one caveat here is that these are December numbers, which means countries that celebrate Christmas may have momentarily slackened a bit in their search for knowledge. But the ratio between absolute traffic from Israel and the US was nearly identical last week, so this seems robust.  In any case, the moral of the story is: I’m investing in Taiwan and Israel!