China has overcome the US to take the top spot as the country that contributes the most to research articles that were published in prestigious science publications last year.
Preliminary data published by Nature in a news story, China also overtook the US as the leading nation in contributions to Earth and environmental sciences for the first time in 2022, while it remained lagged in the field of life sciences.
China Surpasses US in Earth and Environmental Sciences
The Nature Index, which keeps track of information on author affiliations in 82 top-tier journals, discovered that Chinese authors are more productive than their American counterparts in the fields of physics, chemistry, Earth, and environmental sciences.
Life sciences is the only field in which the United States continues to lead.
The conclusion is based on a snapshot of the data from the Nature Index collected in April. This year will see the release of the whole 2022 data.
The balance is shifting toward China, according to other groups that monitor scientific research.
Chinese research made up a larger portion of the top 1% of the most frequently cited publications between 2018 and 2020, according to a report published by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy last year.
Also, according to that study, China published an average of 407,181 scientific publications annually, outpacing the US’s 293,434 output.
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China Research Collaboration
Citations of Chinese research have grown as a result of mentions of the genomic sequencing of COVID-19.
Yet, despite the fact that China has recently surpassed the United States in rankings of scientific research, the two nations continue to collaborate on research the most bilaterally, and many of China’s most cited articles come from partnerships with foreign scientists.
It has gotten more challenging for experts from China and the United States to work together as ties between those two nations deteriorated.
More than 100 scientists lost their employment as a result of the US Justice Department’s China Initiative, which sought to expose Chinese spies operating in United State universities, between 2018 and 2022.
Collaborations with foreigners are likewise closely examined by Chinese universities.
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