Slashdot Mirror
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.
Yes, but the US has the best Fortnite players. Who's laughing now?
Cue Alice Cooper's "School's Out"...
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.
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....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.