China Is Becoming Scientifically Dominant
China will overtake the U.S. for the top spot in the Nature Index within the next few years.
The science journal Nature keeps tabs on which researchers are publishing in their journal, and 81 other top journals in the natural sciences. Each year, they compile this data and put out the annual Nature Index tables.
The premier metric from the Nature Index is a number called the share, which represents each fraction of a contribution to a journal publication with multiple authors. If a publication has 10 authors, the share value would say that each one gets a score of 0.1, regardless of who is first or corresponding author, etc. This metric is used to compare the scientific output of countries, regions, institutions, and other sectors.
When you compare countries, you see an interesting trend in China. While most countries have been relatively stable in their share score, China has been on a steady incline over the past seven years in which the Nature Index has existed. The United States still leads the way, but what was once a wide margin between #1 and #2 has shrunk to the point that those positions will swap in the next few years assuming China continues its trajectory.
Here is a graph I made that shows this by comparing the Nature Index share scores for the United States, China, and the next five global leaders in natural science publications.
While this represents output mainly in biology, chemistry, physics, and some other adjacent fields, one might expect to see a similar trend in journals that are more focused on medicine, computer science, and other fields not represented in the 82 journals in the Nature Index.
This shift didn’t happen accidentally. Last year, China invested 2.4% of its GDP in research and development, a steady increase from 0.56% in 1996. For comparison, the U.S. invests about 3% of it’s GDP in R&D. China has also been quietly, but aggressively recruiting top Chinese scientists from the U.S. and other countries for the past several years. China’s Thousand Talents program, for instance, has lured thousands of researchers to China where they are given a prestigious title and generous financial support for their work.
China’s quest to pursue scientific excellence has been unfortunately hampered by fraud in the past. Specifically, in the form of over-ambitious researchers publishing fraudulent or plagarized material. Such publications might be more likely found in lower-quality journals that are not included in the Nature Index, but this is a growing problem that exists outside of China and can extend to even the highest quality journals. China has made some efforts to preserve credibility by cracking down on this.
As China continues making major investments in basic research, the U.S. has felt pressure to increase funding for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and other research agencies. Some additional funding will be used to support a new directorate in the National Science Foundation called Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships that will focus on getting new technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace.
But that probably won’t be enough to keep up with China’s progress, and at the moment the U.S. doesn’t seem to be in a position to make any gigantic leaps in science funding and policy like China has.
See also my prior post from 2018: Gross Expenditures on R&D Are Rising Fast in China
Robert Lawrence illustrates data and writes about science. You can find his published work at: www.robertlawrencephd.com
