The output of science, technology and innovation has been growing fast over the past decades.
It shows that the semantics on input and output in science can be traced back to the economic literature, and its analyses of growth via an econometric equation called the production function.
For most of the history of scientific methodology the assumption has been that the most important output of science is knowledge and so the aim of methodology should be to discover those methods by which scientific knowledge is generated.
The bibliometric analysis examines the output of science [14].
The output of science shown in Figure 1 will become more formalized than it is now, which is likely to improve the quality of science overall.
In this scenario, a comparison of the world output in science in the framework of thematic specialization highlights the relative achievements of regions and countries with regard to international output.
The choice of the five comparator countries was pragmatic, although supported by international comparisons of output in science and engineering research: American authors produced 205 000 articles in 2005, accounting for 29% of the world's total.
Only someone who has never considered how all-pervasive the outputs of science are in our society could write such a 'dumb' sentence.
What is clear, however, even in the seemingly most straightforward of translational processes, for example from biomarker to drug discovery to testing to adoption in routine clinical practice, is that it is not sufficient to simply throw the outputs of science "over the wall" (Cox 2011).
