한국과학자들의 해외정보의존도 - 그 요인 및 결과

The purpose of this study lies in identifying Korean scientists' dependency on foreign scientific and technical information (STI), with emphasis on investigating the causes and results. Especially, this study intends to investigate the impacts that a growing dependency on foreign STI might have brought and will bring about on the development of indigenous STI in ROK. To the end, the present discussion covers the following specific research questions: 1) what are the major information sources used by Korean scientists to locate STI necessary for research-related activities\ulcorner 2) to what extent do Korean scientists use foreign STI for research-related activates, as compared to the use of domestic STI\ulcorner 3) what are the major factors causing the information dependency among Korean scientists and what are the results of the growing information dependency\ulcorner And finally, 4) what suggestions can be made for ROK to further its indigenous STI development, while minimizing its dependency on foreign STI\ulcorner Survey method, together with citation analysis method, is employed as the major data collection technique. The survey sample consists of 167 most 'representative' Korean scientists selected on the basis of their research productivity. 167 specially-designed questionnaires were mailed and 104 out of 167 were responded. Follow-up interviews were carried out for 32 out of 104 respondents, who returned the questionnaire but did not answer some specific questions. The data collected from these 104 respondents were analyzed on the basis of two distinguished groups namely, junior and senior scientist groups. Among the 104 respondents, 58 a n.0, ppeared to belong to a group of senior scientists (older than age 45 and finished their final degrees since 1980), and 46 belonged to a group of junior scientists (younger than age 45 and finished their final degrees before 1980). The major findings of the present study include: 1) Korean scientists regard 'scientific and technical journals and books'as the most important information source to obtain the recent STI; 2) their dependency on foreign STI, for the purposes of research and teaching, is extremely high (information dependency for research activities is 88.5%, and that for teaching activities 91.2%); 3) the information dependency of junior scientists are higher than that of senior scientists; 4) Korean scientists' growing information dependency is closely related to both small quantity and low quality of domestically-produced STI, and has a statistically significant relationship with their educational background; and finally, 5) in order to theoretically explain the growing information dependency of Korean scientists, a hypothesis - 'chronic cycle of information dependency' was developed and introduced. The present study suggests the promotion of indigenous STI as a desirable alternative to escape from the 'chronic cycle of information dependency. Localization of the imported foreign STI is suggested as a good strategy for the indigenous STI development, and also suggested are STI policies for both success of localization process and promotion of more efficient STI flows at national and international level.