Cambridge plant scientist Professor Tina Barsby explores why academic science leadership in the field is not translating into productivity growth in the UK. A remarkable statistic was presented to me recently. According to an analysis of high-citation academic studies in agriculture, the UK ranked third, behind China and the USA. This analysis of agricultural papers in the world’s leading food producing economies between 2018 and 2022 was conducted by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), defining high-citation papers as a ‘gauge of innovation capacity’, and there…
