Researchers per Million People by Country 2022

About This Dataset

This chart ranks countries by the number of researchers engaged in research and development per million people in 2022, as reported by the World Bank using UNESCO data. Researchers are professionals engaged in the conception or creation of new knowledge, products and methods.

✨ AI Insight

South Korea leads with 9,435 researchers per million people, narrowly ahead of Denmark on 9,037 and Singapore on 8,782. The most striking feature is the dominance of small, wealthy nations: eight of the top ten are European, and the Nordic bloc alone supplies four entries through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland. This is a measure of research intensity rather than scale, which is why large research powers like the United States, China and Japan do not appear despite employing far more researchers in absolute terms. Iceland's presence at 6,864 is remarkable for a nation of under 400,000 people. The top ten spans a relatively narrow band, from 9,435 down to 5,819.

Source: World Bank (UNESCO Institute for Statistics)

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

🏆

South Korea leads with 9,435 in 2022.

📊

Average value in 2022: 7,700 · median: 7,734.

↔️

Gap in 2022: South Korea is 1.6× larger than Belgium.