China leads world in top scientific papers, new study finds

China overtook the United States in top scientific studies in 2019, four years after it reached the same milestone against the European Union, according to a study by researchers from the US, China and Europe. The study, published in the journal Scientometrics on March 2, was based on a reassessment of the top most-cited articles, a closely watched indicator of scientific influence. Under the traditional indicator of the top 1 per cent of most cited research papers, the US still leads China. However, the researchers noticed that China was coming up at the top of a number of measures, but not on the top 1 per cent index, study co-author Caroline Wagner, an associate professor at the Ohio State University, said. “We decided to look at how the top 1 per cent is calculated. When we examined the measure, we questioned the approach being used. When we recalculated, we found that China was at par or in the lead on key measures,” she said. Familiar barriers put China’s women scientists a long way from the top The researchers concluded that the previous measurement may have obscured that China was operating at world-leading levels of scientific output in both volume and quality. Using the existing measure, each field of scientific research is delineated and given a weighting before an overall calculation of the most-cited papers is made. But the new study argues that weighting studies by scientific field makes no sense in comparing the research output of a nation. “When you’re comparing one scientific field with another, then weighting by field makes sense. But it doesn’t make sense when you’re measuring the overall impact of one nation’s science versus another, and it in fact produces erroneous results,” the university’s website quoted Wagner as saying. Wagner and her colleagues used the Web of Science database, which covers citation data for a range of academic disciplines, and used the raw citation data for papers in all fields to make their comparison. They concluded that in 2019, 1.67 per cent of scientific articles with Chinese authors were in the top 1 per cent of the most-cited articles, compared to 1.62 per cent of articles with US authors. China ‘hopes to start exploratory work on moon base by 2024’ Loet Leydesdorff, co-author of the study and an honorary fellow at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said the study ran counter to the Western perception of science in China. “The arguments in many Western governments and society are that … China already surpassed the United States in terms of the total publications, not the top publications,” Leydesdorff said. “That’s often being said about China and we say that’s no longer true.” Wagner said China had made significant investment in research and development, in scientific infrastructure, and in the mobility of students and scholars. “These are steps that any nation takes to enhance their scientific capacity, but China has done this on a very large scale,” she said. “Government policy has targeted leading areas. These investments and policy actions appear to be paying off in terms of scientific quality.” ‘Almost unlimited possibilities’: new Chinese tech is milestone in 6G race Late leader Deng Xiaoping described science and technology as one of the four forces of modernisation in the late 1970s but it was not until the 1990s that it really became a national strategy. China’s expenditure on R&D as a share of its gross domestic product increased from less than 1 per cent in 1980 to 2.4 per cent in 2020, according to Wagner. The country’s spending on R&D hit a new high last year, with total R&D expenditure amounting to about 2.79 trillion yuan (US$440 billion), up 14.2 per cent from the previous year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. It overtook the US in terms of the total number of science publications in 2018, according to the US National Science Foundation. And a Japanese study released last year found that China had overtaken the US in the number of top 10 per cent academic papers, though the US still led in the top 1 per cent of citations. However, Leydesdorff cautioned that China might not stay in the top spot if “it is closing itself from the outside world”. Wagner said there were clear measures showing that China was reducing international cooperation. “There are many possible reasons for this drop, including political pressures and tensions,” she said. “China has also made some statements that indicate the intention to reduce engagement. This would be a mistake: good ideas come from collaboration. Everyone benefits from more good ideas being shared.”