China has overtaken the US as the world leader in both scientific research output and “high impact” studies, according to a report published by Japan’s science and technology ministry.
The report, which was published by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTP) on Tuesday, found that China now publishes the highest number of scientific research papers yearly, followed by the US and Germany.
The figures were based on yearly averages between 2018 and 2020, and drawn from data compiled by the analytics firm Clarivate.
The Japanese NISTP report also found that Chinese research comprised 27.2% of the world’s top 1% most frequently cited papers. The number of citations a research paper receives is a commonly used metric in academia. The more times a study is cited in subsequent papers by other researchers, the greater its “citation impact”.
The US accounted for 24.9% of the top 1% most highly cited research studies, while UK research was third at 5.5%.
China published a yearly average of 407,181 scientific papers, pulling ahead of the US’s 293,434 journal articles and accounting for 23.4% of the world’s research output, the report found.
China accounted for a high proportion of research into materials science, chemistry, engineering and mathematics, while US researchers were more prolific in research into clinical medicine, basic life sciences and physics.
The report was published on the day US president Joe Biden signed the Chips and Science Act, legislation that would authorise $200bn in research funding over 10 years to make US scientific research more competitive with China.
The Chinese embassy in the US said last month that China was “firmly opposed” to the bill which it said was “entrenched in [a] cold war and zero-sum game mentality”.
The “high impact” finding is in keeping with research published earlier this year, which found that China overtook the US in 2019 in the top 1% measure, and passed the European Union in 2015.
Papers that receive more citations than 99% of research are “works that are seen as being in the class of Nobel prize winners, the very leading edge of science”, study co-author Dr Caroline Wagner said at the time. “The US has tended to rank China’s work as lower quality. This appears to have changed.”
The US still spends more on research and development in the corporate and university sectors than any other country, the report also found. “China has the largest number of researchers in the corporate and university sectors among major countries. In the corporate sector, the United States and China are on par with each other, and both are showing rapid growth.”
“China is one of the top countries in the world in terms of both the quantity and quality of scientific papers,” Shinichi Kuroki of the Japan Science and Technology Agency told Nikkei Asia. “In order to become the true global leader, it will need to continue producing internationally recognised research,” he said.
Given how much money universities often scalp off of international students, if that really ramped up I could see it leading to a worsening under-funding crisis in higher education lol
this is extremely true especially in large public schools in the US to keep tuition down for 'in-state' students.
I'm really gonna have to start another attempt at learning Chinese aren't I?
Can't wait to see the response of "China can only copy" :reddit-logo: racists chime in on this. It'll be Olympic gold level mental gymnastics.
The problem is exceptionalism is that you eventually run out of delusions about exceptionalism.
That's not true! Nobody has delusions like us! We're #1 in exceptional delusions :amerikkka-clap:
Hmmmmm....maybe telling multiple generations from boomers to now that "science is for losers" wasn't such a good idea?
That's not the issue, a lack of funding university and research positions is the issue. We have plenty of people in the sciences, we just don't have jobs for them. China does, to the extent that there is a very real phenomenon where professors would prefer students and post docs from China because it reflected better on them since a Chinese student is much more likely to find a tenure track position.
Also that science is only for the rich. I couldn't afford a science degree/education even if it was all I ever wanted to do. The inherent gatekeeping in a capitalist system massively limits potential
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould
back years ago, there was a China-based organization that i am pretty sure had a presence at all the R1 universities in the US, which offered to shepherd anyone interested in graduate school in China to go there. i was finishing my MSc when i noticed one of the emails and looked into it for my area (let's say broadly biology). the pitch was incredible: courses were all offered in english, included housing, stipend for food/etc, no tuition fees. student visa covered. probably mandarin language education would have been included. one just had to be accepted.
of course, for something more nakedly careerist like "business administration", i don't know. but apparently, giving a shit about the environment was enough for them to say "yes, please pursue this. we will pay." looking back i should have gone for it, but i was in the middle of something and when i finished i had zero desire for more grad school, assuming it could be a back pocket plan B.
that organization started getting kicked off campuses all over when the US government threatened to withhold any DoD funding (future or retroactive) from any university that let that organization exist on campus, because with zero evidence the military obliquely accused them of being an espionage organization.... and though they couldn't prove anything, they could add conditions onto DoD funds, even those already awarded. remember when universities were believed to be independent of government machinations? lmao. competitive funding schemes have brought them to heel.
on top of that, i knew some tenured faculty that had gone over on some kind of research trip and been courted by some university. i don't think the pay was exactly competitive with what they were pulling down in the states, but materially everything was better. especially when it came to research. apparently, the universities there provide funding, material, lab workers to researchers they hire and those researchers choose their own research questions to investigate. they weren't expected to chase funding like ours do, which honestly probably accounts for >60% of their labor time.
as someone within the academy, the investments the PRC has been making in scientific research, education, and outreach has absolutely set them up to eat the US' lunch across the board. stats like this are only the first misty drops felt before the dam bursts.
libs will act like "oh chinese students are just cheaters" or "they are just gaming the system somehow", as though the exact same shit doesn't happen here more flagrantly due to nepotism, chasing enrollment/matriculation stats, and careerist bullshit. as tuition and housing skyrocket, the class character of our state schools has almost nothing left of the working class garnish it had decades ago, when scholarships and grants could actually cover costs of living and tuition. in addition, so many faculty don't actually do shit anymore. they maneuver themselves onto committees to chase grant funds and create reportable activities and outputs. actually doing something that answers a real question and/or helps people has become incidental.
Can't even fucking argue with these dipshits because woops comments don't show up
Edit: oh these shitfucks require email verification but they don't have the decency to fucking tell you that instead of auto shadow deleting your shit. I fucking hate reddit.
The racism toward Chinese people on reddit is seriously bad for my health, my blood pressure skyrockets when I go into a thread like that. I need to remind myself that it doesn't matter, China is beating the US by every metric and it's only a matter of time before the cope becomes too much for even reddit libs to handle. The US is only winning in smug reddit comments by racist losers.
I wonder how many of China's studies are Null Result papers.
And I wonder how many American Science Nerds who scream about the preponderance of junk-studies driven by the need to publish any kind of p-value result take that to mean Chinese Science Isn't Real.
cmon, i didnt need another reason to desperately want to move to China. i know their phd programs are more accessible to nobodys like me (compared to the nepotistic west) but now their research is proven to outpace the "international community"
how does one convince their entire family + gf's family that moving to China would vastly improve our quality of life and that we would be working for a glorious cause? its been a difficult road even proving to my mom the greatness of China bc of how the propaganda here is so deeply ingrained in everyones heads
You could move there yourself and then force them to visit you to confront reality
But then they'd accuse you of creating an elaborate potemkin village just for them aided by the entire chinese govt to trick them :yea:
:data-laughing: "pOtEmkIn vIlLaGeS and gHosT ciTiEs"
i dont think my parents or sister are deranged enough to deny what they see in front of them although you never know
thats a good idea tho, that way i just have to convince my gf to do the same, which might not be too, too difficult. now time to actually study mandarin instead of learning like 2 words/week
I’m a climate scientist and it kills me to know (or rather not know) how many papers in my field are being written in China that I’ll never get to read.
It’s literally one of the biggest reasons I have been working so hard to learn Mandarin.
Ah yes, but can they publish phd's based off of wanking to child porn ?
:deeper-sadness: I'd love to move to china but it'd make my gf's degree kinda worthless. I guess I'll move to canada :/
