The article discusses the contrast between academic and corporate research, emphasizing corporate secrecy in protecting innovations while still contributing to scientific publications. Although US firms produce around 30,000 peer-reviewed papers annually, this represents a small fraction of their R&D efforts. Companies like Amazon, with an R&D budget of $85 billion, published just over 200 indexed research articles in 2024. This trend indicates a significant shift in research approaches, with tech giants like Apple and Meta publishing even less, reflecting historical patterns of industrial investment in science during the 20th century.
"It's a big activity that firms are involved in," he says.
In 2024, the company published just over 200 research articles that were indexed in the Web of Science database, owned by analytics firm Clarivate.
Data prepared for Nature Index suggest that other big-tech companies, such as Apple and Meta, are even less likely to publish.
In the first part of the twentieth century, firms tended to invest heavily in science in areas where US academia was lagging behind Europe.
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