Data | China overtakes the U.S. in scientific research output Premium

While there has been dispute over the best metrics with which to judge the quality of research output, China seems to be rising to the top in all of them

For a long time, the U.S. led the world in the number of scientific research papers published and the number of citations that these papers racked up. While the volume of papers published by the researchers of a country alone doesn’t imply a higher chance of winning a Nobel Prize, it still suggests the presence of a productive research establishment. This said, scholars have also devised ways to measure research output that also says something about its quality. On these measures too, the U.S. has been leading all other countries. But this dominance seems to be slipping.

For more than half a decade now, Chinese researchers, or researchers whose primary affiliation is a China-based institution, have been publishing more papers than those in the U.S.

Chart 1 | The chart shows the papers published in science and engineering conferences and peer-reviewed journals indexed in the Scopus database. India is currently third on this list.

Last month, China was found to have overtaken the U.S. on a metric designed to capture quality as well: the number of researchers or institutions whose papers received the most citations for papers in the 82 natural science journals tracked by Nature Index.

Chart 2 | The chart shows the number of publications from different countries on Nature Index journal papers.

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China upped its focus on science and technology and investments in it in 1976, as part of the ‘Four Modernizations’ programme. By 2015, it was spending 2.07% of its GDP on R&D. In 2018, it had more than 4 million scientific researchers within its borders — the world’s highest — making the quantity of papers unsurprising.