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

Inevitable, really

[CrimsonAvenger]

There are four Chinese for every American, five for every two Europeans. All other things being equal, they're going to become the dominant country in everything.

The only country that's going to be close is India (again, all other things being equal).

Lacking a major war, or internal political factors, the Chinese and Indians are going to dominate the world over the next couple centuries, and the USA is going to go the way of the UK - a nation that dominated "back then"....

Note, for the record, that I don't think "all other things being equal" actually applies. I don't think either China or India can liberalize enough to allow their inherent advantages to really take hold. But you never can tell....

Re:Inevitable, really

[Archtech]

I wonder how many contributors to this thread are aware that, until the 19th century, China and India were far and away the world's dominant economic powers?

Re:Politics

[vakuona]

If the USA made them mandatory, then yes.

If only...

[bpetty]

If only their quality was as high as their quantity.
One common complaint within scholarly circles in recent times is the unusually low quality of published works coming out of China.
China is to academic publishing as India is to computer software development. It seems like every other person there is producing this stuff, but only a very small subset produce something worth paying attention to.

Re:Quality of output?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Yeah, this is what I came in here to say. It seems like all the obviously fake science that's not printed in an Elsevier journal is coming out of China. Is China actually producing more quality research, or just more paper output?

Re:But is it useful?

[hey!]

We won't know and we can't know... yet. What really measure the impact of a paper's contribution is its citations. Check back in 5 years and rank countries by citations and you'll have a better idea.

Going by raw output volume, it shouldn't be surprising if China surpasses the US. Nearly one person in five alive lives in China. If you rank the top ten countries by science and tech research papers, it goes (or rather, went) US, China, Japan, Germany, UK, India, France, Italy, Korea, Canada. But if you rank those countries by per capita output, you get Canada, UK, US, Germany, France, Korea, Italy, China, India.

On a per capita basis, UK and Canada are very similar, as are the US, Germany, France, Korea, and Italy. China follows far behind that group, and India trails far behind China. That may be because many Indian scholars emigrate overseas, especially to the US. Similarly the US ranking is probably inflated by the large number of immigrant researchers here. As the US becomes less friendly to foreign students and researchers, we can expect our research output to fall both in quality and quantity.