AbstractIt has been argued that British science was in decline during the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. However, a computer count of the percentage of contributions with a UK address among the sources of the Science Citation Index gives a different picture: British scientific output was relatively stable over the 1970s, then showed a remarkable increase from 1981 onwards. The discrepancies between these figures and those of earlier publications can be explained in terms of the databases which were used.