The Scientific Arms Race

Since 2012, the Chinese government has been focused on shifting its economy from quantity (think: cheap, plastic toys) to quality (think: knowledge-based products and services), with a publicly-stated goal of being a global powerhouse in innovation by 2050.

And it seems to be working. According to a report by Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy published last week, China has overtaken the US in both quantity and quality of scientific research.

👩‍🔬 By the numbers… Between 2018 and 2020, 23.4% of the world's scientific papers were published in China. The US published 16.9% of the world’s papers over that same period, good for second-place.

Enough on quantity – what about quality?

• Since there’s no truly objective way to measure the quality of research studies, scientists use something called citations – essentially the social proof of the scientific community. Similar to how we lend more credence to TikToks with a lot of likes, the more a study is mentioned (“cited”) by other researchers, the more it’s assumed to be of higher-quality and have a greater impact on the field.
• Chinese research accounted for 27.2%, or 4,744, of the world's top 1% of most cited papers between 2018-2020, overtaking America at 24.9%, or 4,330. The UK came in third with 5.5%.

📸 Big picture: The quality finding is in-line with research published earlier this year, which found China overtook the US in 2019 in the top 1% measure, and passed the EU in 2015.

+Dive deeper: Overall, the US still spends more on corporate and university R&D – for now at least. The Aspen Institute released a report in July predicting China would overtake the US by 2025, though part of the recently signed CHIPS and Science Act includes $170+ billion for research funding over the next five years.

While it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, America spent $664 billion in 2020, and China spent a record $441.3 billion in 2021.