Jointly published by Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest

and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht

Scientometrics,
Vol. 56, No. 1 (2003) 95110

A scientometric study of the research performance of the

Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore
CHU KEONG LEE
Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
This paper describes results of a scientometric study of the Institute of Molecular and Cell
Biology (IMCB). The purpose of the study is to evaluate the research performance of IMCB in the
first ten years since its establishment. Research inputs and three research outputs  publications,
graduate students, and patents filed, are examined. The findings indicate that in the ten years,
IMCB produced 395 research papers, 33 book chapters, 24 conference papers, and 4 monographs,
graduated 46 PhDs and 14 MScs, and filed 10 patents. In its quest to become world-class, IMCB
researchers have been very selective in where they publish  95.6% of the articles were published
in ISI journals. The articles received an average of 25 to 35 citations per article, and the percentage
of uncited articles is 11.6%. Four articles received more than 200 citations, and 18 received
between 100 to 200 citations.

Introduction
The Singapore government has been developing Singapore into a research hub. In
times of shrinking research budgets in the West, Singapore has been increasing its
public-sector research expenditure. Research initiatives in Singapore are spearheaded by
the National Science and Technology Board (NSTB), which was formed in 1991, with a
mission to develop Singapore into a centre of excellence in selected fields of science
and technology so as to enhance its national competitiveness in the industrial and
services sector. The First National Technology Plan (NTP1), launched in 1991, charted
the directions for NSTB in the promotion of R&D which is economically relevant to
Singapore. In NTP1, the Singapore Government committed S$2 billion for a five-year
plan for science and technology development. Thirteen research institutes and centres
were set up, private sector R&D initiatives were co-funded and foreign talent were
brought in to augment the pool of local researchers. It resulted in a rapid build-up of
science and technology in Singapore. NTP1 culminated in 1996 with Deputy Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong announcing in the same year, a commitment of another S$4
Received June 19, 2002.
Address for correspondence:
CHU KEONG LEE
Division of Information Studies, Nanyang Technological University
Blk N4 #2C107, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798
E-mail: ascklee@ntu.edu.sg
01389130/2003/US $ 20.00
Copyright 2003 Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest
All rights reserved

CHU KEONG LEE: The Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore

billion to develop science and technology from 19962000. With the huge investment
in research, it was felt that a measurement of the output from the research would be
timely.
The Institute
The IMCB was established in 1987 at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Chris Tan, a professor at the medical faculty of John Hopkins University and later
Calgary University, was called back by the then Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Sui
to be its director (Leong, 1997). Its mission is to develop and foster a vibrant research
culture for biological and biomedical sciences which will support the development of
biotechnology for the human healthcare industry in Singapore.
The IMCB is funded by the NSTB. Since its inception, the NUS has provided much
assistance in the administration of the institute. In 1997, the IMCB became an
autonomous institute, when it was incorporated as a company limited by guarantee.
International journals have given the IMCB top grades for its research performance and
for having established itself as an internationally renowned institute within a short span
of existence:
Science described the IMCB as having put Singapore on the international scientific
map (Kinoshita, 1993). From 19951998, Nature reported: The molecular biology
laboratory nearest to the equator has done excellently It is a great triumph to have
won such a reputation in just under 8 years (Maddox, 1995), the IMCB has already
established its name in the world of science (Swinbanks, 1996), is approaching worldclass standards in research (Swinbanks and Nathan, 1997), and has built an
impressive publication record by any standards (Swinbanks and Nathan, 1998).
The IMCB was awarded the 2000 Nikkei Asia Prize for establishing itself as a major
research institute and for becoming a world leader for life science research in less than
10 years (Tan, 2000).
Literature review
Scientometrics and bibliometrics has been used to evaluate the research performance
of academic departments in universities, and of research centres. Zachos (1991)
evaluated and compared the research performance of the mathematics departments of

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two Greek universities  Ioannina and Patra in the years 19751984.* He looked at
the degree and nature (local or international) of collaborative research in groups under
evaluation, and the local or international character of the impact produced by
differentiating between self, in-house, and foreign citations.
Beck and Gspr (1991) assessed the standard of research of five departments
(biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics, and physics) of the Faculty of Natural
Sciences at Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen, Hungary by performing a
scientometric evaluation of the publication activities of the departments. They examined
the number of papers published and divided them into two groups  those published in
world languages and those published in Hungarian. These two groups were further
divided into those published in Science Citation Index (SCI) registered journals and
non-SCI registered journals. The quality of the papers published by the five departments
was judged by the impact factor of the journal in which the paper was published.
Le Minor and Dostatni (1991) compiled an inventory of the French National
Institute for Health and Medical Researchs (INSERM) publications by querying
MEDLINE and the Science Citation Index (SCI). They then performed a bibliometric
study of the publications in an effort to develop a tool that would help the Institutes
scientific decision makers. From their study they found that 20% of INSERMs
publications appeared in French journals, and 80% in international ones (33% from the
United States and 45% from Europe). They used SCIs field classification to calculate
an Activity Index which was used to identify INSERMs strong research fields relative
to other French research organisations. They also performed a socio-demographic study
of INSERMs researchers and studied the number of publications as a function of the
age and position (hospital vs research members) of the coauthors.
Irvine and Martin (1984, 1985) evaluated CERNs past research performance and
compared it with that of the worlds other main accelerators using a combination of
bibliometrics and peer-evaluation data, a method they call the method of converging
partial indicators, developed by the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of
Sussex for the scientific output from major central research facilities. They found that
there was a clear consistency between the results yielded by the bibliometric indicators
and peer-evaluation. Realising that the absolute quantification of the research
performance in basic science is not possible, they use a comparative approach.

In order to allow for citations to accumulate, for citation counting purposes, the period considered
was 19751987.

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King (1988) used bibliometric techniques to evaluate research by the UK

Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC) in the area of avian virology
performed at the Houghton Laboratory (HL) as a method for assisting its peer review
procedures. He also ranked HL against four other avian virology research groups.
Daniel and Fisch (1990) reviewed the history of research performance evaluation in
the university sector of the Federal Republic of Germany over a fifteen-year period
(19751988). During this period, 23 major studies at various levels of aggregation
(national, town, institutional, departmental, individual) were performed, but differences
in conceptualisation, data collection, counting and weighting procedures made it very
difficult to generalise findings across the studies. He noted the trend away from studies
comparing entire universities towards comparative studies at the departmental and
individual levels within scientific disciplines and summarised the different performance
measures used, which included the number of dissertations supervised.
Vinkler (1998) assessed the activities between 1992-1995 of the research institutes
of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences with the goal of characterising the activities of
the institutes. This exercise was done to aid the restructuring of the institutional network
of the Academy. Bourke and Butler (1996) described a study by the Research Policy
and Evaluation Project at the Australian National University (ANU). The study covered
30,000 items from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities that were published by
the Institute of Advanced Studies (ISA), a fulltime research institution at the ANU.
Data sources
All data are extracted from official, and publicly available documents of the
National University of Singapore and of the NSTB.
1. The research expenditures and research manpower from 19911996 were obtained
from the 1996 Annual Report of the NSTB.
2. The publication output of IMCB from 1987 to 1996 were obtained from the annual
publication, NUS Publications and Theses.
3. The patent output were obtained by searching though the Delphion Intellectual
Property Network (http://www.delphion.com/), and the Singapore ePatents database
(http://www.epatent.gov.sg/).
4. The citation data were obtained from the Science Citation Index Expanded.

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Results
Inputs into IMCB
Number of research scientists and engineers (RSEs) at IMCB (19911996). From
Table 1, it can be seen that the number of RSEs at IMCB has been on the increase from
116 in 1991 to 179 in 1996, an increase of 54.3%, or an annual average increase of
10.9%. The only year in which there was a decrease is 1995, when the number dropped
from 165 to 161. This may be due to the insufficient replacement for the outgoing MSc
and PhD students in the bumper crop of MSc and PhD graduates in 1992 (9 graduates),
1993 (9 graduates), and 1994 (15 graduates).
Table 1. No. of RSEs at IMCB from 19911996
Year

No. of RSEs

Increase over previous year (%)

1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

116
147
159
165
161
179

26.7
8.2
3.8
2.4
11.2

The overall increase in R&D manpower reflects the success of IMCB to act as a
magnet to draw research talent to Singapore. It is remarkable that the IMCB has
managed to increase its manpower from 10 to 179 in ten years. It is no surprise then that
Time magazine reported that the IMCB played a role in the brain-drain shift from the
West to the East (Nash, 1994).
Recurrent Budget of IMCB. In the same period, the recurrent budget of IMCB
(Table 2) increased monotonically from S$19.38 million to S$36.37 million,
representing an overall increase of 87.7%, or an average annual increase of 17.5%. This
may be attributed to the high-growth economic years, especially from 1993 to 1996, and
in part to the increasing commitment of the government to R&D. This is in sharp
contrast with many developed countries where in the same period, budgets were
slashed. In the U.S., the endless frontier of virtually unlimited government research
funds closed with the end of the Cold War, which had supplied much of the rationale
and urgency for federal investment in science. Another reason for this was the deficitridden U.S. government. Cohen and Noll (1994) reported that the U.S. governments
R&D expenditure, adjusted for inflation, fell by 7% from 1988 to 1994. In the Ukraine,

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spiralling economic crisis, high inflation, plummeting production, and the break-up of
the Soviet Union had caused research funding in 1996 to plummet to one twelfth of that
in 1989 (Josephson and Egorov, 1997).
Table 2. Recurrent budget of IMCB from 19911996
Year

Recurrent budget (millions of S$)

1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
TOTAL

Increase over previous year (%)

19.38
21.76
25.93
28.81
31.78
36.37
164.03

12.3
19.2
11.1
10.3
14.4

Publication output of IMCB

Publication counts (19871996). The IMCB increased its number of journal articles
from 11 in 1987 to 61 in 1996, an overall increase of 445%, or an annual increase of
44.5%. This is an impressive performance, given that the corresponding annual increase
in the number of RSEs is 10.9% and the recurrent budget, 17.5%.
Book chapters, a distant second, started to be published in 1990. This may be due to
the fact that authors for book chapters are sourced by invitation, and depend very much
on the reputation and visibility of the researcher. This accumulates over time and as can
be seen, this mode of scientific communication has been on the rise since then.
Table 3. Publication output of IMCB researchers from 19911996
Year
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
TOTAL
%

100

Journal
articles

Conference
papers (L)

Conference
papers (O)

Monographs

Book
chapters

Total

11
11
29
39
44
46
54
59
41
61

0
5
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

0
4
1
10
3
0
0
0
0
0

0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
2
0

0
0
3
3
3
0
6
6
9
3

11
20
34
52
50
46
61
66
52
64

395

18

33

456

0.9

7.2

99.9

86.6

1.3

3.9

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Overseas conference papers appeared from 1988 through 1991 in which a total of 18
papers were delivered. Local conference papers were concentrated in 1988 and 1989 in
which a total of 6 papers were delivered. It would appear that the IMCB researchers did
not participate very much in conferences, but Maddox (1995) reported that the institute
spends generously to enable members of the staff to attend conferences overseas, that
one conference a year seems to be the minimum, and that graduate students also
travel. This indicates that the IMCB conference attendees either did not present papers
at the conference they attended, or that the NUS Publications and Theses is not
complete insofar as conference papers are concerned.
Not surprisingly, journal articles made up 86.6% of the total publication output of
IMCB in its first ten years, followed by book chapters, overseas conference papers,
local conference papers, and lastly monographs. All the journal articles were published
in conventional journals. This is not surprising, as Harter (1996) had reported in his
study that up to that time, the great majority of scholarly, peer-reviewed, electronic
journals had essentially no impact on scholarly communication in their respective fields
with only eight of the 39 e-journals studied having been cited ten or more times over
their lifetimes.
The increase in publication output may be due to many factors, one of which is the
availability of more research manpower (RSEs). The increase in research funds may
have also resulted in the purchase of better equipment, etc. The organisational learning
that took place over the ten years may have resulted in the acquisition of experience,
resulting in improvements in the performance of individual workers, and a better
understanding of who is good at what so they know whom to go to for advice or
assistance, and how to structure their work better.
Technological improvements over the passage of time, e.g. an increase in computing
power, or greater accuracy in the instrumentation, may have had an effect. The
economies of scale may have also contributed, e.g., when an expensive equipment, say
an ultracentrifuge, is purchased, or when a new journal is subscribed, more than one
research group may use it.
Lastly, research projects that require long gestation period may have finally started
producing results. That research can sometimes take time cannot be underestimated
Princeton mathematician, Andrew Wiles, took eight years of intense effort, working in
isolation and secrecy, to prove Fermats Last Theorem.* During this time, he published
very little.

He was awarded the Wolf and Wolfskehl Prizes for his success.

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It is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate the factors above or hold any one of them
constant to isolate the effect of each. What we can deduce is that scientific activity has
certainly increased during the ten years.
Journal articles per RSE (19911996). This parameter relates output to input and
therefore reflects the productivity of the RSEs. The number of journal articles per RSE
hovers at approximately 0.3. The low ratio of 0.25 for 1995 may be due to the new,
inexperienced, researchers replacing the large batches that graduated in 19931995.
From these fractions, it can be deduced that many researchers did not contribute to the
scientific literature at all, or if they had contributed, only as coauthors.
Table 4. Journal articles per RSE at IMCB from 19911996
Year

No. of journal articles

No. of researchers

Journal articles per RSE

1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

44
46
54
59
41
61

116
147
159
165
161
179

0.38
0.31
0.34
0.36
0.25
0.34

Thousand dollars per journal article (19911996). This is another parameter that
relates output to input, reflecting the cost of producing knowledge. As expected, the
cost per research paper has increased by 37.6% over the five year period, from
S$440.5k in 1991 to S$606.2k in 1996. This works out to an annual increase of 7.5%.
The expenditure of journal articles per dollar increased. The dip in number of journal
articles per researcher to 0.25 in 1995 resulted in the expenditure per journal article
shooting up to S$775.1k for that year.
Table 5. Journal articles per RSE at IMCB from 19911996

102

Year

No. of journal articles

Research expenditure

Thousand dollars per journal

article

1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

44
46
54
59
41
61

19.38
21.76
25.93
28.81
31.78
36.37

440.5
473.0
480.2
488.3
775.1
596.2

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CHU KEONG LEE: The Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore

Number and percentage of RSEs participating in scientific communication

(19911996). From Table 6, it can be seen that approximately half of the RSEs publish
in one form or another every year. Comparing these numbers with the number of
journal articles in Table 3, it can be deduced that most of the RSEs wrote multiauthored papers.
Table 6. RSEs participating in scientific communication
Year

No. of RSEs with at

least one publication

Total no. of RSEs

62
56
77
84
72
107

116
147
159
165
161
179

1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

Percentage of RSEs participating

in scientific communication
53.4
38.1
48.4
50.9
44.7
59.8

Prestige of the journals that IMCB researchers publish in 19871996. From Table
7, it can be seen that the articles have been published in journals of increasing impact
factor, reflecting the visibility and average impact that the papers are likely to achieve.
This serves to promote IMCB to the global research community, and increase its
prestige. When IMCB started, its director, Chris Tan, had to beg, borrow, or steal these
guys from around the world. In 1997, it was reported that it had reached a stage where
there was a steady stream of good people applying, with two research positions
drawing about 100 applicants.
Table 7. Average impact factor for journals that IMCB RSEs publish in 19871996 (publication strategy)
Year

No. of journal articles

1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

11
11
29
39
44
46
54
59
41
61

TOTAL

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Scientometrics 56 (2003)

Total impact factor

57.238
23.762
123.314
129.601
228.730
275.206
358.226
300.601
261.826
378.414

Average impact factor

5.203
2.160
4.252
3.323
5.198
5.983
6.634
5.095
6.386
6.204

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Actual impact and visibility of the journal articles published by IMCB researchers
(19881996). Table 8 shows that IMCB researchers have almost exclusively published
in ISI journals (378 out of 395 articles). This, by itself, is often taken as an indication of
the quality of research output.
Table 8. Percentage of articles published in ISI journals
Year

Number of articles published in ISI

journals

1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

11
9
28
33
43
46
51
57
41
59
378

OVERALL

Percentage of articles published in ISI

journals
100.0
81.8
96.6
84.6
97.7
100.0
94.4
96.6
100.0
96.7
95.7

Table 9. Average number of citations per journal article published by IMCE RSEs
Year
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

No. of journal articles

Average citations per journal article

140
886
1051
1445
1305
1858
1506
1616
1529

11
29
39
44
46
54
59
41
61

12.7
30.6
26.9
32.8
8.4
34.4
25.5
39.4
25.1

M = total no. of accumulated citations up to July 2000

In addition, Table 9, shows that the average actual citation received per article
throughout the ten years has been on the increase. As Table 9 indicate accumulated
citations, and not the number of citations from a window period, the citations to the
1996 articles have been accumulating for only four years (19962000), while the
citation to the 1988 articles have been accumulating for a much longer period
(19882000). I chose not to use the popular three-year window period for two
reasons. Firstly, as this analysis attempts to measure the impact of IMCB in the entire
ten years, all citations should be included. Secondly, 1996, being the last year of

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analysis, and therefore the worst case, had four years for citations to accumulate. By the
fourth year, many articles would have already obtained most of their citations. With the
exception of 1988 and 1995, the average citation per article has been fluctuating in the
2535 citations per article range.
Lewison (1998) identified a small set of eight prestigious journals in which medical
faculties published. They were, in alphabetical order, Cell; EMBO Journal; Journal of
Clinical Investigation; Lancet; Nature; New England Journal of Medicine; Proceedings
of the National Academy of Science, USA; and Science. By 1996, IMCB RSEs had
published in five of the eight (all except Journal of Clinical Investigation; Lancet; and
New England Journal of Medicine).
Table 10. Number and percentage of uncited articles
Year
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
OVERALL

Number of uncited articles

4
6
13
4
2
5
8
0
5
47

Percentage of uncited articles

36.4
20.7
33.3
9.1
4.3
9.3
13.6
0.0
8.2
11.6

The skewness of science implies that there will be a large number of uncited
publications. Seglen (1992) puts the figure at more than 50%. By this measure, the
IMCB performs exceptionally well as overall, only 11.6% of its papers are uncited.
Citedness has been found to change with the age of scientific articles. Seglen (1992)
found that in general, after a third-year peak, citedness declines steadily as a function of
time since publication, reflecting the gradual obsolescence of the article contents. He
also found that the citation distribution is not affected by the citation window. The
citation distribution from the one-year window, the five-year window, and the allyear window is the same.
In the case of IMCBs papers, every year of the first to the ninth years after
publication has witnessed a peak in citedness for different papers. The peak in citedness
for each paper did not exhibit a predictable pattern, although for most papers, it
occurred in the second to fourth years after publication, confirming Seglens (1992)
observation.

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Number of high-impact (highly-cited) journal articles (19881996). IMCB has four

papers that received more than 200 citations (one, in fact, received 527 citations). A
total of 18 papers received between 101 and 200 citations.
Table 11. Breakdown of citations received by IMCB research articles
Year
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
TOTAL

1 d M d 20
5
7
10
15
22
23
38
23
35
178

21 d M d 50
0
9
8
18
16
15
9
8
12
95

51 d M d 100
2
6
5
5
4
7
1
7
5
42

101 d M d 200
0
1
3
2
1
3
2
2
4
18

M t 201
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
0
4

M = total no. of accumulated citations up to July 2000

Number of review articles. In the ten years, the IMCB researchers have only been
responsible for three review articles, one each in 1990, 1993, and 1994. This may
indicate that the IMCB researchers have not attained a high standing from their
scientific peers as their percentage (0.8%) is lower than the 23% of all published
articles reported by Woodward and Hensman (1976).
Mean citedness of papers. The IIF reflects the visibility and impact of a research
institution instead of a journal. As with the journal impact factor, the IIF eliminates
some of the bias of such counts which favour large research organisations over smaller
ones, and of older organisations over newer ones. This bias has to be eliminated because
older organisations have a larger citable body of literature than newer ones; and larger
organisations have a larger citable body of literature than smaller ones. All things being
equal, the larger the number of previously published articles, the more often a research
organisation will be cited.
Table 12 shows the IIF of IMCB increasing. The visibility and impact of IMCB,
e.g., can be seen in the greater ease with which it is able to attract potential research
workers now when it advertises for them. This is also seen in comments about the
IMCB putting Singapore on the scientific road map. This visibility will be crucial to
attract foreign talent to Singapore, one of the key roles the IMCB is to fulfil.

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Table 12. Mean citedness of papers

Year
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

Mean citedness of papers

2.85
5.05
7.13
8.11
7.90
15.1
11.7

From Tables 7 and 12, the Relative Citation Rate indicator can be computed.
Table 13. Relative Citation Rate
Year

Relative Citation Rate

1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996

0.858
0.971
1.192
1.222
1.551
2.365
1.886

Knowledge transfer indicators

Number of patents (19871999). Besides teaching and research, the promotion of
economic growth is now a task of a research organisation. Research centres have to
translate their research findings into objects which can be profitably used or sold. The
apotheosis of disinterested basic research, motivated chiefly by the curiosity of the
scientist has now been superseded by a new paradigm, i.e., research that is
economically relevant. The responsibility of research centres now does not end with
transmission of their discoveries to interested users. It has to go one step further to
making them practical and commercially profitable. In the U.S., the Clinton
administration and many in Congress have made strategic research, i.e. economic goals,
a condition for expanded basic research funding (Etzkowitz and Kemelgor, 1998).
Critical in the exploitation of the knowledge created is its transfer to the industry. The
quick exploitation of knowledge is important in the tradition of open publication, where
technological vultures could swoop into research organisations in search for free
useful knowledge which they could then use for their own benefit.

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The IMCB does not seem to have been very successful in the area of patents. Nine
patents were found in the Delphion databases (2 US, 5 European, and 2 WIPO), and
five from the ePatents database. Only ten unique patents were found after the removal
of duplicates.
Number of MSc and PhD Dissertations (19871996). One of the critical bottlenecks
in Singapores quest for scientific success is the shortage of qualified scientists and
engineers. A critical mass of scientific talent and infrastructure is needed, and this is
where IMCBs training in research will contribute. This locally-developed scientific
talent will complement the foreign talent pool. From Table 14, the IMCB has been
producing postgraduate students from 1989, with a surge in 1994 and 1995. Most of the
postgraduates are PhDs (76.7%).
Table 14. Number of MSc and PhD graduates from IMCB
Year
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
TOTAL

MSc

PhD

0
0
0
0
3
1
6
1
2
1

0
0
1
1
4
8
3
14
12
3

14

46

Conclusion
The inputs into the IMCB increased: the number of RSEs from 116 in 1991 to 179
in 1996 (an annual increase of 10.9%); and the recurrent budget from S$19.38 million
to S$36.37 million in the same period (an annual increase of 17.5%). This is in step
with the Singapore governments push for R&D.
In its first ten years, the IMCB produced 395 research papers, 33 book chapters, 24
conference papers, and 4 monographs. This output was contributed by approximately
50% of the research personnel. The research papers were published in journals of
increasing impact factor, resulting in increased visibility for the IMCB. The articles
received an average of 25 to 35 citations per article. In the IMCBs quest to be worldclass, it has selectively chosen to publish in ISI journals, where an overall of 95.6% of

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the articles appear. The overall percentage of uncited articles stands at 11.6%, which is
very good. IMCB has also published 4 articles with more than 200 citations, and 18
with between 100 to 200 citations. However, the number of review articles (three in ten
years) was smaller than expected. This may indicate that the IMCB researchers have not
attained a high standing from their scientific peers.
The number of patents filed (ten in ten years) was smaller than expected in a field
where technology is very close to science. The IMCBs contribution to research
manpower was significant, as it produced 46 PhDs and 14 MScs.

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