China Now the Most Prolific Contributor To Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Math (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Thirty years ago in December, the modern exchange of scholars between the U.S. and China began. Since then, Chinese academics have become the most prolific global contributors to publications in physical sciences, engineering and math. Recent attempts by the U.S. to curtail academic collaboration are unlikely to change this trend. Qingnan Xie of Nanjing University of Science & Technology and Richard Freeman of Harvard University have studied China's contribution to global scientific output. They document a rapid expansion between 2000 and 2016, as the Chinese share of global publications in physical sciences, engineering and math quadrupled. By 2016, the Chinese share exceeded that of the U.S. Furthermore, the authors argue that these metrics -- which are based on the addresses of the authors -- understate China's impact. The data don't count papers written by Chinese researchers located in other countries with addresses outside China and exclude most papers written in Chinese publications. The researchers adjusted for both factors and conclude that Chinese academics now account for more than one-third of global publications in these scientific fields.

Comments

But is it useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, exclude all papers found to be misleading, wrong or outright fake. How big is China's impact on contributing to the sciences now?

Re:But is it useful?

[xandos]

China has been investing massively in science. China has a few really good universities itself, as well as many Chinese people studying in prestigious places abroad who come back to contribute to science in those universities (just as people from every other country in the world do). Science is a global pursuit, and the fact that China puts a large amount of money and manpower towards it means it can contribute significantly. While it was the case (and in some cases still is the case) that China had to catch up to meet the standards of the USA and western countries, they have been catching up quickly and an increasing amount of the work done in China is now groundbreaking. This is not surprising. The only thing you need is smart people, knowledge, and massive funding. And the knowledge-part of that can be learned from scientific publications or the international exchange of scientists.

If the USA wants to make sure they stay somewhere near the top, they should not attempt to 'curtail academic collaboration'. That doesn't help anyone, and only slows down global science. It also might have the effect that the collaborations will simply move to China-Europe instead of China-USA, which would speed up progress in China and Europe, but not the USA. The only thing that can help the USA stay on top (if they are on top) is to do more and better science than anyone else, not to somehow try to make other people do less or less good science.

Re:But is it useful?

[Joce640k]

Note to self: No fake/misleading papers are ever published in the USA.

Quality of output?

[drakyri]

I don't think this factors in what I believe is a higher likelihood for scientific papers originating in China to involve plagiarism and/or fraud. Although the authors note an increase in publications in high-impact journals like Nature and Science, there doesn't appear to be any other real quality metric - just a note about valuing the average paper coming from China as 1/5 as much as a Western paper, based on number of subsequent citations. With the goals of this study, I don't think that's a rigorous enough metric to draw any conclusions other than that the quantity of papers emerging from China is increasing.

So far CN scientific papers are mosrtly fraud

[sinij]

From what I have seen so far Chinese papers are universally fraud. I am on peer review lists for a number of papers, and from what I have seen it is mostly junk papers that are coming out of China. Not just language, that can be forgiven/edited, but bad methods, obviously cooked data, blatant plagiarism.

Re:So far CN scientific papers are mosrtly fraud

[Archtech]

That would certainly help to explain why China remains completely unable to build enormous modern cities, high-speed trains, hypersonic missiles, supercomputers, satellites, etc.

Re:Politics

[Mashiki]

So where's it say that some form of religion is mandated by the state in the US? Right. Canada has a heavier influence of religion on it's state then the US, to the point that Catholics were guaranteed protected rights, including a fully functional and separate education system funded by general revenue taxes. And *is* mandated by the state and constitutional law that it must exist.