IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
FOR MOST OF the past century, American and European scientists produced the bulk of the world’s influential research. Laboratories from Boston to Berlin set the agenda. That era has ended.
A new study by Abhishek Nagaraj and Randol Yao, two economists, traces 44m academic papers published between 1980 and 2022. They found that China now accounts for 32% of global publications, up from virtually nothing four decades ago. America’s share has fallen to 15%. In top-tier journals, China produces more than a third of all papers, beating the United States as well as the European Union.
Chinese researchers have grown more productive and not just more numerous. They made up 18% of the world’s researchers in 2022 but 26% of those publishing in elite journals. The country now dominates engineering and the physical sciences. In materials engineering, communications engineering and physical chemistry, China produces over 60% of breakthrough publications. Walk into any chemistry department anywhere and the odds are high that the most interesting new work comes from Shanghai or Shenzhen.
Yet the picture becomes more complex when you follow the citations. Science is a conversation. And Chinese researchers increasingly talk among themselves. Between 58% and 68% of citations to Chinese papers come from other Chinese papers, even for really influential work. That is a striking outlier. Other regions show far higher rates of cross-border citation. Over time global science has become more interconnected with one exception. Chinese research has remained stubbornly insular. The country has built a formidable research machine, but it has not yet fully joined the global exchange of ideas.
America still leads in biomedical and health sciences. In reproductive medicine and biochemistry, its primacy is unchallenged. That specialisation matters. The subjects that attract Chinese attention differ from those that preoccupy Western labs. Among the most-cited papers, over 40% focus on American topics. Only 13% address middle- and low-income countries. The rest of the developing world, for its part, leads in agriculture and food sciences but struggles to place work in top journals. Global research remains stratified even as China climbs the ladder.
The main lesson is that things are spreading but not really connecting. China has poured money into laboratories, as well as trained a generation of scientists and reaped a harvest of papers. In narrow output terms, the rise is complete. But the citation data suggest a lingering distance. Great science requires production as well as connection. On that measure China still has work to do. The country has built a cathedral of research. Now it must learn to welcome visitors through the door. ■
