Hong Kong a rising contributor to Greater Bay Area’s research in strategic fields like AI and biomedicine, report says
- Collaborative research initiatives in Hong Kong and the GBA have seen total research output from the region nearly double from 2018 to 2022
- The number of active researchers in the region also doubled during the same period, with 207,800 scholars as of 2022
Sham said the Elsevier report’s findings showed that the region’s research output is starting to reflect the size and scale of this dynamic area.
The Elsevier report shows the GBA’s efforts to grow into a world-class information and technology hub, and what Hong Kong has done so far to help drive that goal forward.
Hong Kong’s universities were collectively described as the main “pulling force” in international and industry collaborations in the GBA, according to Lynn Li, president of Elsevier Greater China.
CUHK, for example, made its biggest contribution in AI with 1,244 publications from 2018 to 2022, according to the report. That accounted for 5.8 per cent of the GBA’s total research output of 21,432 publications in the field during the same period.
In biomedicine, CUHK contributed its largest research output among the five strategic fields with 3,265 publications in that five-year period, which made up 5.3 per cent of the GBA’s total output of 61,548 publications in the field.
CUHK also contributed 5.1 per cent, 3.4 per cent and 2.6 per cent to the GBA’s total research output, respectively, in the fields of quantum technology, environmental science and clean energy during that five-year period, according to the report.
Hong Kong is home to five of the world’s top 100 universities, namely the CUHK, the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and City University, according to the 2024 QS World University Ranking.
It also indicated that researchers in Hong Kong are more productive than their peers in the GBA, producing twice as many publications per active author as those in the rest of the region.