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EDITORIAL
Scientific Productivity in Portugal
After the substantial reform of the Portuguese scientific and technological ecosystem in the 1990s, we have witnessed impressive growth in the number of research institutions and researchers, as well as in their scientific productivity. According to a series of recent reports on the Portuguese scientific landscape, the country now has around 21,000 PhD researchers distributed across just over 300 research and development units (1). When we compare this with the situation in the 1980s - and with the level of funding currently available for science in Portugal- it becomes clear that we can all be proud of these achievements.
This picture becomes even more encouraging when we compare our position with that of other European countries typically regarded as scientific and technological role models. For example, the percentage of full-time-equivalent researchers relative to the active population is about 1.6% in Portugal, compared with around 2% in Germany (2).
While this difference may already surprise many of us, given that we might expect a much larger gap, the number of scientific publications normalized by population size is likely to be even more striking: Portugal produces 1,971 publications per million inhabitants, whereas Germany produces only 1,540 per million (2). On average, therefore, Portuguese researchers publish about 1.6 times more than their German counterparts.
Faced with these figures, one question naturally arises: why is this so surprising? Another indicator may help resolve the puzzle. A similar comparison based on the number of scientific patents yields a ratio of approximately 9.1 in favor of Germany (2). Moreover, this comparison does not even account for the economic value of those patents, which is unlikely to reduce the disparity.
We must therefore conclude that, although we have won the battle of scientific knowledge creation, we now need to win the battle of transferring technology to industry, helping to transform this knowledge into innovation and, ultimately, into economic value. While this is primarily the responsibility of industry, we scientists can certainly contribute to this endeavor.
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(1) Prof. Adélio Mendes, “Instrumentos e Mecanismos de Financiamento à Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação”, Apresentação pública da metodologia para a definição das prioridades nacionais de investigação e inovação no âmbito da criação da AI2, Lisboa, Feb. 24, 2026.
(2) Prof. Eugénio Ferreira, “Análise do Ecossistema Científico, Tecnológico e de Inovação Nacional”, Apresentação pública da metodologia para a definição das prioridades nacionais de investigação e inovação no âmbito da criação da AI2, Lisboa, Feb. 24, 2026.
José Carlos Pedro
(IT President)
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