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Q: Number of Scientists and Engineers in the world ( No Answer,   1 Comment )
Question  
Subject: Number of Scientists and Engineers in the world
Category: Reference, Education and News > General Reference
Asked by: craig87-ga
List Price: $10.00
Posted: 01 Aug 2002 15:09 PDT
Expires: 31 Aug 2002 15:09 PDT
Question ID: 48233
How many scientists and engineers are there in the world? 
Specifically I would like to get a breakdown by country.
For instance the US Census list roughly 3.5 Million in the United
States and the are roughyl 3.8% in the world, but I need to find out
the total by country.

Request for Question Clarification by scriptor-ga on 01 Aug 2002 15:24 PDT
Dear craig87,

Could you please clarify your definition of "engineers" and
"scientists"? For example, in German "Ingenieur" (= engineer) is
someone constructing and maintaining machines, but not a computer
programmer. And "Wissenschaftler" (= scientist) could as well be
someone researching microbiology or Ancient literature. And these are
only the definition problems for a single country.

Regards,
Scriptor

Request for Question Clarification by tehuti-ga on 02 Aug 2002 03:55 PDT
I doubt you are going to get a definitive answer.  I found a comment
about the SESTAT databases "currently representing about 13 million
scientists and engineers in the United States.", which does not tally
with the census figure you cite  Also, as scriptor points out,
definitions of who is or is not a scientist or an engineer tend to
vary a lot from one country to another.  It might be possible to get a
partial listing of statistics from a number of individual countries,
but I reckon this will require hours of work.

Clarification of Question by craig87-ga on 02 Aug 2002 11:03 PDT
Well to answer your question, I am looking for engineers and scientist
using the definition that we would use in the United States. An
engineer is someone who goes to school to learn to
design/develop/produce a product, for example.

I would consider a biologist a scientist but somone that studies
classics would not be included.
When you look at the data from the www.nsf.com, they tend to break
things down between "physical" and "social" science with the
classics/humanities falling under social science.


I am willing to accept something that would be considered reasonbly
close, i.e. within 20% of the actually number.
Answer  
There is no answer at this time.

Comments  
Subject: Re: Number of Scientists and Engineers in the world
From: davidsar-ga on 01 Aug 2002 16:39 PDT
 
According to a UNESCO report:

T H E S T A T E of science and technology in the world  1 9 9 6 – 1 9
9 7

there were 5,189,400 "researchers" in the world in 1997.

You'll have to check the report itself to get the full context for the
term "researchers" and whether this is useful for your needs.  The
report is at:

http://www.uis.unesco.org/en/pub/pub0.htm

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