Coronavirus trumps poor US-China relations as scientific collaboration spikes, study shows

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, American and Chinese teams have increased their cooperation on related research, paper says

Scientific collaboration between the two countries has seen ‘explosive growth’ in recent years and scientists have ‘doubled down’ since start of global health crisis, co-author says

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Chinese and American researchers have been working together more than ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a new study. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:30pm, 23 Jul 2020Updated: 2:54pm, 27 Jul 2020

Corrected [2:53pm, 27 Jul, 2020]

[2:53pm, 27 Jul, 2020]
This story has been corrected to show John Haupt co-authored a study with Professor Jenny Lee from the University of Arizona College of Education. An earlier version incorrectly stated that John Haupt co-authored a paper with Caroline Wagner.

Despite the poor state of relations between China and the United States, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to an increase in cooperation between scientists from the two countries, according to a new study.

A team from the US and Australia looked at 10,000 papers involving coronavirus research published between the start of 2018 and April 2020. In the two years through 2019, 3.6 per cent of them involved collaboration between Chinese and American scientists, but in the first four months of this year, that figure rose to 4.9 per cent.

The findings were published on Tuesday in the open-access scientific journal PLOS One.

The results come as research projects in the US involving Chinese partners or funding are facing tighter scrutiny and Washington has been making it more difficult for Chinese researchers and students to get visas to enter the US.

Chinese scientists are among the world’s most prolific producers of research into the novel coronavirus and Covid-19. Photo: AFP

Caroline Wagner, an associate professor of international affairs at Ohio State University, said collaboration between China and the US had seen explosive growth in the past few decades.

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