With Output and Impact
Rising, China's Science Surge
Rolls On
by Christopher King
Accelerating a trend noted in Science Watch® four
years ago, the People's Republic of China has in recent years dramatically
increased its output of scientific papers, while also seeing the citation
impact of those papers steadily rise. In all, the figures clearly signify a
nation rapidly securing prominence in world science.
The graph to the right shows the number of papers indexed by
Clarivate between
1985 and 2007 that listed at least one author address in the People's
Republic of China. (The chart also reflects comparable figures for other,
selected Asian nations). From roughly 3,700 papers in 1985, China's
representation in the database increased to nearly 80,000 papers in
2007—almost a doubling of the 40,000-odd papers indexed as recently
as 2003.
When Science Watch last surveyed China research in 2004 (15[5]:
1-2,
September/October 2004), the nation's annual output of Thomson
Reuters-indexed papers still fell shy of Japan's 2003 total of 75,000+
papers. Subsequently, as the current graph shows, China's rising trajectory
in output intersected that of Japan in 2006 and soared past in 2007. In
fact, among all nations, China ranked #2 by number of papers published
during 2007, second only to the United States.
China’s number of High-Impact
Papers by year, 1998-2007
1998:
73
1999:
83
2000:
127
2001:
187
2002:
245
2003:
321
2004:
363
2005:
458
2006:
530
2007:
511
SOURCE: Clarivate Essential Science
Indicators
Table 1 below details China's recent output, showing 20
main fields of science ranked according to the nation's percent share of
Clarivate-indexed papers in each field for the cumulative period 2003
to 2007. The table also shows the citation-impact figure (that is, cites
per paper) for China in each field, along with the world cites-per-paper
average.
As in the 2004 survey, China's greatest concentration in the latest
five-year period proved to be in materials science, but the change between
then and now is striking and illustrative of China's progress. In the
previous survey, the nation fielded roughly 15,000 materials papers, or
nearly 10.5% of Clarivate-indexed papers in the field. The current
figures, by contrast, show more than 27,000 materials papers, representing
upwards of 16% of the field. The numbers for physics tell a similar story:
the 2004 survey noted 37,985 papers and 8.19% of the field for 1999-2003,
while the current tally indicates 70,483 physics papers and 13% of the
field.
Along with the surge in output, the figures demonstrate an appreciable rise
in the impact of China's published papers in recent years. The second graph
to the right tracks citation impact compared to the world average in four
selected fields, in overlapping five-year periods from 1985 to 2007. In
materials science, for example, papers from China registered at 87% of the
world average in the field (or just 13% below) in the most-recent period,
up from 44% of the world mark in the 1985-89 period. In mathematics,
China's impact scored at 90% of the world mark, up from 42% in the
mid-1980s. Although the impact of papers from China has yet to attain the
world average in any of these main fields, the nation appears to be on a
steady upward course in that direction.
Table 2 above provides another indication of China's
growing influence in the literature. Based on figures from Thomson
Reuters's
Essential
Science IndicatorsSM, the table shows China's annual
numbers of "high-impact" papers—those that ranked among the top 1%
most-cited reports of each year since 1998. As the table indicates, China
fielded more than 500 such papers in each of the last two years, a
seven-fold increase over the figure of 73 high-impact papers recorded from
China in 1998.
According to Essential Science Indicators, the most-cited paper in
the last 10 years exclusively featuring authors based in the People's
Republic of China is
"Coronavirus as a possible
cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome," by
J.S.M. Peiris and colleagues, Lancet, 361(9366): 1319-25,
2003; this paper has now been cited nearly 900 times. (Peiris was
interviewed in these pages in the September/October issue of 2004.)
Research into SARS, in fact, accounts for the top three China-based
blockbusters of recent years: the second-most-cited paper is "A major
outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Hong Kong," by N. Lee,
et al., New Engl. J. Med., 348(20): 1986-94, 2003, now
cited more than 675 times. Peiris and colleagues also fielded the #3 paper:
"Clinical progression and viral load in a community outbreak of
coronavirus-associated SARS pneumonia: a prospective study,"
Lancet, 361(9371): 1767-72, 2003, with upwards of 550
citations.