Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, is amongst the world’s main tutorial establishments for scientific research and is ranked no.1 in China
For a very long time, the U.S. led the world in the variety of scientific research papers revealed and the variety of citations that these papers racked up. While the quantity of papers revealed by the researchers of a rustic alone doesn’t suggest the next probability of profitable a Nobel Prize, it nonetheless suggests the presence of a productive research institution. This stated, students have additionally devised methods to measure research output that additionally says one thing about its high quality. On these measures too, the U.S. has been main all different international locations. But this dominance appears to be slipping.
For greater than half a decade now, Chinese researchers, or researchers whose major affiliation is a China-based establishment, have been publishing extra papers than these in the U.S.
Chart 1 | The chart reveals the papers revealed in science and engineering conferences and peer-reviewed journals listed in the Scopus database. India is presently third on this listing.
Last month, China was discovered to have overtaken the U.S. on a metric designed to seize high quality as properly: the variety of researchers or establishments whose papers acquired the most citations for papers in the 82 pure science journals tracked by Nature Index.
Chart 2 | The chart reveals the variety of publications from completely different international locations on Nature Index journal papers.
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China upped its concentrate on science and know-how and investments in it in 1976, as a part of the ‘Four Modernizations’ programme. By 2015, it was spending 2.07% of its GDP on R&D. In 2018, it had greater than 4 million scientific researchers inside its borders — the world’s highest — making the amount of papers unsurprising.
Chart 3 | The chart reveals the international locations with the most ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ (y-axis in log scale). ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ consult with these whose papers acquired the most citations, after filtering and evaluation by Clarivate Analytics, primarily based on papers in the Web of Science database (together with social sciences).
The information recommend that the high quality query that dogged China’s research output for a time could also be fading now. India isn’t in the prime 10.
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In 2018, the Chinese authorities introduced a coverage to crack down on scientific misconduct that, in line with Nature, would penalise offending scientists with “loss of grants and awards” and limit alternatives “outside academia”. In 2020, it additionally reversed its coverage to pay bonuses to researchers for publishing papers.
A notable characteristic of China’s rise is the ‘Thousand Talents’ programme which launched in 2010. It incentivised achieved research students to maneuver to China, the place they might obtain massive one-time bonuses, particular research funds, priorities on grants, privileges on their visas (in the event that they weren’t Chinese), and assist with housing.
A examine revealed in January discovered that the ‘Young’ model of the scheme had introduced many younger scientists again to China however not individuals who had develop into leaders in their fields. One of the examine’s authors informed South China Morning Post that this was as a consequence of bureaucratic intervention, nepotism, and China not being “at the global knowledge frontier yet”.
The plan has additionally drawn suspicion. In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department started to probe researchers with ties to China. It discovered that Charles Lieber, a chemistry professor at Harvard University, had acquired cash as a part of the ‘Thousand Talents’ programme however hadn’t disclosed it to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. He was convicted in 2021 and sentenced in April 2023.
Technological innovation has been at the coronary heart of the growth of recent China, a lot in order that its chief political ideology has been referred to as ‘techno-nationalism’.
Chart 4 | The chart reveals the variety of patent purposes acquired.
While China is properly in the lead on patents filed, India is fourth.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
Source: U.S National Science Board, Nature Index, Clarivate Analytics, and the World Intellectual Property Organization
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