The title of this post was taken from an article of The Economist that concerns the best spending (£18bn or $23bn) strategy for UK research, the most influential in the world because Scopus shows that they produce 14% of the most highly cited publications in the world.
And contrary to USA that is a decline Nobel powerhouse UK is still very competitive. On this issue see figure below taken from the paper: Gros, C., 2018. An empirical study of the per capita yield of science Nobel prizes: is the US era coming to an end?. Royal Society open science, 5(5), p.180167.
The amazing thing, however, is that UK managed to be that influential even spending much less in research (1.7%) as a percentage of GDP, than South Korea (4.2%),Switzerland (3.4%), Sweden (3.3%) or USA (2.8%) !
