For the first time, China marginally surpassed the United States in the number of most-cited papers, according to Japan’s Institute for Science Policy. provide new evidence. “People disrespect China. [saying] They put out a lot of stuff, but the quality isn’t great,” says Caroline Wagner, who studies science policy and innovation at The Ohio State University, Columbus. “It’s just myopia.”

But academics disagree about the best methodology for measuring publication impact, and other indicators suggest the US is still ahead, but just barely.

For the new report, Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) tallied the top 1% of papers by citation count, a rarity where many Nobel laureates live. However, many such elite articles have authors from multiple countries, complicating analysis. In one study, NISTEP used a method called “fractional counting” to split credits. For example, if her one institution in France and her three in Sweden contributed to the paper, France received her 25% of the credits and Sweden her 75%.

Using this criterion, China accounted for 27.2% of the most cited papers published in 2018, 2019 and 2020, while the United States accounted for 24.9%. The UK was next with 5.5%. Japan was 10th. (U.S. researchers were still marginally ahead when NISTEP used a less detailed method that equally evaluated all countries contributing to highly cited papers, regardless of the number of institutions involved.) was.)

Cao Cong, a science policy scholar at the University of Nottingham campus in Ningbo, China, says the methodology may exaggerate China’s contribution to internationally co-authored papers. “The question is who led the research, the Chinese or their international collaborators,” he says.

The question is who the Chinese or their international collaborators [high-impact] the study.

• Cao Cao
• University of Nottingham, Ningbo

Still, the increase in top-cited papers in China is “notable,” says NISTEP. Twenty years ago, he was ranked 13th in the fractional count metric.

In 2016, China surpassed the United States in the number of papers published in the world. But critics criticized the quality of China’s research, pointing to a policy (now phased out) that offered professional rewards to authors based on the sheer number of published papers. They also noted that there appears to be a growing number of China-based paper mills offering author slots to researchers in exchange for money. But new research shows that China is adept at doing top-notch science that is cited by many researchers.

Other measures of impact still lead the US. State of Science and Engineering in the United States 2022A report released in January by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) addresses one problem with reports such as NISTEP. To achieve better results in the Olympic medal rankings. Instead, NSF measured the share of highly cited papers in each country. This allows comparisons between countries, regardless of publication volume. That analysis showed that US papers were highly influential: more than twice as many papers were published in 2018 as the expected 1% based on the country’s total production. was among the most cited papers in the world. China published 20% more cited papers than expected. (Some countries that publish fewer papers overall, such as Canada and the UK, outperform both the US and China on this metric.)

The United States and China were essentially linked in yet another study. scientific metrology A different method was used by Wagner and colleagues in 2019. Similar to a new report from Japan, we found that China published somewhat more papers than the US in the top 1% of most cited papers that year. However, the margin between the two countries was not statistically significant in terms of scores for the actual number of such papers versus the expected number.

Another paper published in 2020 by Wagner et al. concluded that Chinese research was slightly more innovative than the global average. This study tracked the frequency with which the reference lists of articles included atypical combinations of journals from different disciplines as a proxy for innovative ideas.

However, publication influence is only one measure of a country’s scientific strength. The United States still leads in other indicators such as research spending and PhDs awarded. However, with China leading the way in patent filings, there is no doubt that China’s science enterprise is catching up with the rest of the world at an unprecedented speed.