China in first place globally for top papers

Country overtakes US in production of high-quality scientific research

China has overtaken the United States for the first time in terms of the average number of high-quality scientific papers produced from 2017 to 2019, according to a report by a Japanese government-linked institute this month.

High-quality papers typically refer to the top 10 percent of the most cited scientific papers in their respective field.

China topped the global ranking with an average of 40,219 such papers published annually in the three-year period, followed by the US with 37,124, and the United Kingdom with 8,687, according to Japanese Science and Technology Indicators 2021.

The report has been published annually since 1991 by the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, which is affiliated with Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Each report is based on the three-year period that ended two years before.

The latest report found that US papers performed well in fields such as clinical medicine, basic life sciences, physics and geosciences from 2017 to 2019, while Chinese papers were most cited in the fields of materials science, chemistry, engineering, and computer sciences and mathematics.

In the 1990s, China used to rank 10th or lower among major science nations in the number of high-quality scientific papers, the report said. However, it saw significant improvement in the following years, reaching second place globally by the late 2000s and holding onto that position until rising to the top between 2017 and 2019.

Two factors that have contributed to China's rapid rise in science and technology output are its massive talent pool and research budget, the report noted. In 2019, China had around 4.86 million full-time research and development personnel and research expenditure of over 2.2 trillion yuan ($340 billion), according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

China has also seen a steady rise in the annual number of new doctoral degree holders, reaching around 61,000 in 2019. That was second to the United States, which had 90,000 new PhD recipients that year, the report said.

An even more prestigious category is called highly cited papers, which are studies that performed in the top 1 percent based on the number of citations received, according to Web of Science, a global academic literature and citation database.

From 2017 to 2019, the US published 4,413 highly cited papers annually within the three-year period, followed by China with 4,046 and the UK with 970, the report said. From 2007 to 2009, China could only produce 579 such papers each year.