A trial of general indicator of science and technology: Methodological study of overall estimation of national S&T activity

This paper presents methods using a large number of quantitative indicators of the overall estimation of national S&T activity. The methods collected here apply multivariate analysis techniques to a set of S&T indicators to investigate its structure and extract a single or a small number of indicators of S&T activity. We perform structural analysis and integration of 14 main S&T indicators in 5 countries, the U.S., Japan, Germany, France and the U.K. Latent variables underlying this set of indicators naturally emerge from this analysis, and from these we were able to extract valuable information concerning the nature of S&T activity in each country. This method was also useful for investigating the nature and interpretation, as well as the reliability, of previous S&T indicators.