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About the report

Trends in Engineering Research presents a bibliometric analysis of the UK’s engineering research outputs.

The Royal Academy of Engineering commissioned Digital Science and Technopolis to provide insights into the strengths, quality and impact of UK engineering research from 2007 to 2021. The report presents comprehensive data on the UK’s strengths, gaps and trends in engineering research and also poses key questions on the health of the engineering research sector, its contribution to a safer and more resilient UK.

The analysis shows that there is a positive story to be told about engineering research in the UK, which has a strong global reputation with excellent high-quality across all areas. However, this status is not guaranteed and there are signs that action may be needed to strengthen it.

The Executive Summary captures the key findings from the analysis, while the accompanying and additional data are available in the supporting Evidence Report.

The findings presented in this report are based on a bibliometric approach, which inherently includes certain methodological and interpretive caveats. We are currently conducting follow-on work to further check and contextualise these findings, with a particular focus on industry funding and collaboration.

Contact us

For more information, please contact Arizona Rodriguez

605,358

UK publications in engineering research between 2007 and 2021

17.4%

of all UK research publications were in engineering research field

3.3%

of the top 1% of highly cited work globally

3.9%

of global engineering research contributed by the UK

Key findings

When it comes to research quality, the UK secures second position behind the US when analysing the percentage of publications in the top 1% of most highly cited engineering publications globally.

Machine Learning is a clear UK success story, performing substantially better than global comparators. On the other hand, areas of historic strength such as aerospace and biomedical engineering show a decline in quality.

The UK’s strongest sub-disciplines in terms of quality are: Machine Learning, Manufacturing, Engineering, Applied Computing, Theory of Computation, and Human-Centred Computing.

The UK remains a partner of choice and there is a high degree of international collaboration both bilaterally and multilaterally. It has a strong global reputation with Italy, China, the US and France as the UK’s top collaborators.

Despite the UK’s favourable position in terms of quality, there has been a sharp increase in the quality of engineering research in other countries such as South Korea and China.

Bilateral collaboration is the most frequent form of collaboration evidence in nearly 40% of publications.



There is heavy reliance on funding from EPSRC, with two thirds of UK engineering research publications crediting EPSRC as a funder.


Internationally, both the EU and China are recognized as influential funders and co-funders of international collaborative engineering research.

When analysing 'trust markers' as an indicator of research integrity, UK engineering performs well and is in line with world standards in most sub-disciplines.

Female electronics engineer runs vehicle tests

Upcoming work

Whilst the report shows that there is a positive story to be told about engineering research in the UK, emphasising its strong global reputation, its findings also raise critical questions about the future of the sector’s health. The Academy is undergoing further activities to help answer some of these questions to help inform whether continued analysis or action is needed.

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