China was the biggest contributor to research in top science journals last year
- Nation took top spot from US for the first time in 2022, according to data from Nature Index
- Chinese contributions have continually grown since the index was launched in 2014, article says
China has surpassed the United States for the first time to become the biggest contributor to research articles published in top science journals last year, according to a database of author affiliations.
China also took the top spot from the US in contributions to Earth and environmental sciences for the first time in 2022, though it still trailed in life sciences, according to preliminary data released by Nature in a news article.
The data is from the Nature Index, which tracks contributions to papers published in 82 journals covering different disciplines of the natural sciences – namely chemistry, Earth and environmental sciences, life sciences and physical sciences.
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It includes world-leading peer-reviewed journals such as Cell, Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The complete dataset for 2022 will be released next month.
According to the Nature news article, China’s contributions have been continually increasing since the index was launched in 2014. It also emerged as the top-ranking country for physical sciences and chemistry in 2021.
The index takes into account the percentage of authors from a nation on each published paper. An article authored by a group of researchers who are all China-based would yield a “share” of 1 for China. In 2022, China had a share of nearly 19,400, while the US had 17,610.
But the United States had a share of almost 790 in two major journals, Nature and Science – significantly higher than China’s 186.
China was also behind the US when it came to the number of articles with at least one author from the country. China had a count of around 23,500 articles for that category in 2022, while the US had almost 25,200.
China is the world’s second-largest spender on scientific research, with R&D funding surpassing 3 trillion yuan (US$426.6 billion) in 2022, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Between 2018 and 2020, China contributed 27.2 per cent of the world’s most-cited papers – those ranking in the top 1 per cent in terms of citations – while the US accounted for 24.9 per cent, the “Japanese Science and Technology Indicators” report said.
China also claimed the top spot from the US in 2016 for the number of scientific papers published, according to Science magazine.
