Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, is one of the world’s leading academic institutions for scientific research and ranked No. 1 in China
For a long time, the US led the world in the number of scientific research papers published and in the number of citations to these papers. While the amount of papers published by a country’s researchers alone does not imply a high chance of winning a Nobel Prize, it does suggest the presence of a productive research establishment. That said, scholars have also devised methods of measuring research output that also say something about its quality. America has been ahead of all other countries on these measures as well. But this dominance seems to be eroding.
For more than half a decade, Chinese researchers, or researchers whose primary affiliation is with a China-based institution, have been publishing more papers than US
Chart 1 | The chart shows papers published in science and engineering conferences and peer-reviewed journals indexed in the Scopus database. India currently ranks third in this list.
last month, It turns out that China has overtaken America Also on a metric designed to capture quality: the number of researchers or institutions whose paper received the most citations for a paper among the 82 natural science journals tracked by Nature Index.
Chart 2 | The chart shows the number of publications from different countries on the Nature Index Journal Papers.
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China increased its focus on science and technology and investment in it in 1976 as part of the ‘Four Modernizations’ programme. As of 2015, it was spending 2.07% of its GDP on R&D. In 2018, it had more than 4 million scientific researchers within its borders – the world’s highest – making the volume of papers astonishing.
Chart 3 | Chart shows countries with most ‘highly cited researchers’ (y-axis in log scale). ‘Highly cited researchers’ refer to those whose papers received the most citations based on papers in the Web of Science database (including the social sciences) after filtering and analysis by Clarivate Analytics.
The data suggest that the quality question that for a time plagued China’s research output may now be fading. India is not in top 10
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In 2018, the Chinese government announced a policy to crack down on scientific misconduct that would punish offending scientists with “loss of grants and prizes” and restrict opportunities “outside academia”, according to Nature. In 2020, it also reversed its policy of paying bonuses to researchers for publishing papers.
A notable feature of China’s rise is the ‘thousand talents’ program which was launched in 2010. This encouraged accomplished research scholars to move to China, where they could receive large one-time bonuses, special research funds, preferences on grants, privileges on their visas. (if they weren’t Chinese), and help with housing.
A study published in January found that the ‘young’ version of the plan brought many young scientists back to China, but not those who went on to become leaders in their fields. One of the study’s authors told the South China Morning Post that this was due to bureaucratic interference, nepotism and China not being “at the global knowledge frontier yet”.
Doubt has also been raised on the plan. In 2018, the US Department of Justice opened an investigation into researchers with ties to China. It was found that Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, had received money as part of a ‘thousand talents’ program but had not disclosed the same to the US Internal Revenue Service. He is convicted in 2021 and sentenced in April 2023.
Technological innovation has been central to the development of modern China, even as its dominant political ideology has been termed ‘techno-nationalism’.
Chart 4 | The chart shows the number of patent applications received.
While China leads the list in terms of patents filed, India ranks fourth.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
Sources: US National Science Board, Nature Index, Clarivate Analytics and World Intellectual Property Organization
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