China’s AI research quickly catching up to US in this new metric: number of citations

China’s rapid ascendance in artificial intelligence research continues, supported by new data that suggests the country is catching up to the US in high impact research in the field.

While China has already surpassed the US in number of published AI papers, the country’s AI researchers are poised to be in the top 50 per cent of most cited papers this year and in the top 10 per cent next year, according to findings by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Seattle-based non-profit that conducts research and engineering projects.

The results, which drew on a database of 2 million papers published up to 2018, show that the US share of citations in the top 10 per cent of AI papers has declined gradually from 47 per cent in 1982 to 29 per cent last year. China, on the other hand, has risen to over 26 per cent of citations in 2018.

“Citation counts are a lagging indicator of impact, so our results may understate the rising impact of AI research originating in China,” said the report that was published on Wednesday.

The findings highlight the latest efforts made by the world’s two superpowers in what has been dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, and provides a new gauge for academics to measure strength in AI research.