China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation – should the US be worried?

[beijingwalker]

China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation – should the US be worried?​

Published: January 10, 2023 1.30pm GMT

In 2022, Chinese researchers published more scientific papers on artificial intelligence than any other nation. Mf3D/E+ via Getty Images

By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.

I am a policy expert and analyst who studies how governmental investment in science, technology and innovation improves social welfare. While a country’s scientific prowess is somewhat difficult to quantify, I’d argue that the amount of money spent on scientific research, the number of scholarly papers published and the quality of those papers are good stand-in measures.

China is not the only nation to drastically improve its science capacity in recent years, but China’s rise has been particularly dramatic. This has left U.S. policy experts and government officials worried about how China’s scientific supremacy will shift the global balance of power. China’s recent ascendancy results from years of governmental policy aiming to be tops in science and technology. The country has taken explicit steps to get where it is today, and the U.S. now has a choice to make about how to respond to a scientifically competitive China.

Growth across decades​

In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the Four Modernizations, one of which was strengthening China’s science sector and technological progress. As recently as 2000, the U.S. produced many times the number of scientific papers as China annually. However, over the past three decades or so, China has invested funds to grow domestic research capabilities, to send students and researchers abroad to study, and to encourage Chinese businesses to shift to manufacturing high-tech products.


Since 2000, China has sent an estimated 5.2 million students and scholars to study abroad. The majority of them studied science or engineering. Many of these students remained where they studied, but an increasing number return to China to work in well-resourced laboratories and high-tech companies.

Today, China is second only to the U.S. in how much it spends on science and technology. Chinese universities now produce the largest number of engineering Ph.D.s in the world, and the quality of Chinese universities has dramatically improved in recent years.

Producing more and better science​

Thanks to all this investment and a growing, capable workforce, China’s scientific output – as measured by the number of total published papers – has increased steadily over the years. In 2017, Chinese scholars published more scientific papers than U.S. researchers for the first time.

Quantity does not necessarily mean quality though. For many years, researchers in the West wrote off Chinese research as low quality and often as simply imitating research from the U.S. and Europe. During the 2000s and 2010s, much of the work coming from China did not receive significant attention from the global scientific community.

But as China has continued to invest in science, I began to wonder whether the explosion in the quantity of research was accompanied by improving quality.

To quantify China’s scientific strength, my colleagues and I looked at citations. A citation is when an academic paper is referenced – or cited – by another paper. We considered that the more times a paper has been cited, the higher quality and more influential the work. Given that logic, the top 1% most cited papers should represent the upper echelon of high-quality science.

My colleagues and I counted how many papers published by a country were in the top 1% of science as measured by the number of citations in various disciplines. Going year by year from 2015 to 2019, we then compared different countries. We were surprised to find that in 2019, Chinese authors published a greater percentage of the most influential papers, with China claiming 8,422 articles in the top category, while the U.S had 7,959 and the European Union had 6,074. In just one recent example, we found that in 2022, Chinese researchers published three times as many papers on artificial intelligence as U.S. researchers; in the top 1% most cited AI research, Chinese papers outnumbered U.S. papers by a 2-to-1 ratio. Similar patterns can be seen with China leading in the top 1% most cited papers in nanoscience, chemistry and transportation.

Our research also found that Chinese research was surprisingly novel and creative – and not simply copying western researchers. To measure this, we looked at the mix of disciplines referenced in scientific papers. The more diverse and varied the referenced research was in a single paper, the more interdisciplinary and novel we considered the work. We found Chinese research to be as innovative as other top performing countries.

Taken together, these measures suggest that China is now no longer an imitator nor producer of only low-quality science. China is now a scientific power on par with the U.S. and Europe, both in quantity and in quality.

Fear or collaboration?​

Scientific capability is intricately tied to both military and economic power. Because of this relationship, many in the U.S. – from politicians to policy experts – have expressed concern that China’s scientific rise is a threat to the U.S., and the government has taken steps to slow China’s growth. The recent Chips and Science Act of 2022 explicitly limits cooperation with China in some areas of research and manufacturing. In October 2022, the Biden administration put restrictions in place to limit China’s access to key technologies with military applications.

A number of scholars, including me, see these fears and policy responses as rooted in a nationalistic view that doesn’t wholly map onto the global endeavor of science.

Academic research in the modern world is in large part driven by the exchange of ideas and information. The results are published in publicly available journals that anyone can read. Science is also becoming ever more international and collaborative, with researchers around the world depending on each other to push their fields forward. Recent collaborative research on cancer, COVID-19 and agriculture are just a few of many examples. My own work has also shown that when researchers from China and the U.S. collaborate, they produce higher quality science than either one alone.

China has joined the ranks of top scientific and technological nations, and some of the concerns over shifts of power are reasonable in my view. But the U.S. can also benefit from China’s scientific rise. With many global issues facing the planet – like climate change, to name just one – there may be wisdom in looking at this new situation as not only a threat, but also an opportunity.

China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation -- should the US be worried?

In 2014, Chinese researchers published more papers than any other country for the first time. In 2019, China overtook the U.S. as the No. 1 publisher of the most influential papers.

theconversation.com

 

[beijingwalker]

Scientists leave Japan for China, wooed by better teamwork, jobs​

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

January 10, 2023 at 07:00 JST

Motoharu Nowada in Kanagawa Prefecture chats with members of his lab in China through online conferencing in August. He had returned to Japan because of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Shoko Tamaki)

Scientists who left Japan for better prospects elsewhere said the nation’s decision-makers could learn from China’s massive push to become a world leader in scientific research.

China has aggressively invested in research and development, poaching more and more scientists from places like Japan, where researchers face restrictive work environments and a dearth of funding.

One expert said if Japan wants to improve its international research standings and stop the brain drain of its fledgling researchers, it will have to foster work environments that allow scientists to devote themselves freely to their research.

MORE OPPORTUNITIES, MORE PRESTIGE

A Japanese scientist in his 30s remembers the immense pressure he felt when his term as assistant professor was about to expire in 2022.

He had been job hunting for a few years, seeking to become an associate professor at a national university in Japan, but nothing turned up.

“Oh, I failed again,” he said to himself. “Perhaps it’s time to begin applying for jobs at places other than universities I want to work at.”

As he pondered the thought, one scene would not leave his mind.

When he attended a scientific meeting in the United States in winter 2019, he had an opportunity to see a professor from China he knew who was wooing Chinese students studying abroad to his new research center.

As he watched young Chinese researchers listen to the professor with beaming eyes, he started to feel frustrated by the thought that Japan could end up being left behind in China’s dust.

The Japanese researchers he knew were all prone to fatalism. They would make up excuses or become resigned about their work. They often complained of minuscule budgets or a lack of time for doing adequate research.

Once he was back in Japan, he told his wife, “Those (Chinese students) are the sort of enthusiastic people I wish to work with.”

The scientist had also been approached by the professor for recruitment.

He worried that going to China offered promised nothing in return, but he decided to give it a shot.

“I needed the determination of someone announcing himself as a warlord during the Warring States Period (late 15th and 16th centuries),” he said.

He got a gig as an associate professor and moved to China with his family in spring 2022.

He found the scientists there to be highly motivated. They care about publishing many research articles and rarely miss an opportunity, he said.

The man said he feels that, unlike in Japan, Chinese society holds science and academia in high esteem, and promising young scientists are being hired and given status while they are still budding.

But he does not believe everything is rosy about being a researcher in China. There can be top-down policy changes that make it unnervingly difficult to tell whether scientists will continue to grow in number and whether political authorities will continue to place importance on science.

Yet he said he still feels excited at the prospect of doing something new.

WORKPLACES STIFLING PROGRESS

Motoharu Nowada, a 49-year-old space plasma physicist, was employed as a postdoctoral research fellow at Peking University in Beijing in 2010. His monthly take-home pay was only about 32,500 yen ($245) at the time.

Nowada said he ended up in China by chance.
After obtaining a Ph.D. at Tokai University in Japan, he could not find work at national universities. He landed a job at a university in Taiwan on a contract that would last two and a half years.

When that term expired, he was back in the job hunt but was met with the same rejections from universities in Japan. He was offered a job after he contacted a Peking University professor whose research paper had interested him.

Nowada’s contract expired again after five years, and his third spell of job hunting was even tougher than the previous time, possibly because he was older.

In the end, the Peking University professor introduced Nowada to a professor with Shandong University in China’s Shandong province, who hired him as a research associate.

He is being paid five times what he received five years earlier, thanks partly to China’s economic growth.

Although his job comes with a term that expires in 2024, Nowada said he has no regrets about his choice.

One thing that he finds strikingly different between Japanese and Chinese universities is the way people communicate within a lab.

In China, researchers form strong connections not only with supervisors but also with fellow lab mates, who respond immediately to social media messages.

But at many universities in Japan, the hierarchy is much more rigid, with the professor being the king of the castle.

After spending more than a decade at Chinese universities, Nowada said he does not necessarily agree with the popular view that China’s remarkable scientific results are made because research is better funded there than it is in Japan.

“I believe the environment that allows scientists to discuss anything among themselves is a major reason that China’s research capabilities improved,” he said.

Nowada said he has the impression that more Japanese scientists in recent years hope to go to China, where they believe there is better funding and more time set aside for research.

“By basic principle, however, your research proposals will not pass the screening and you will not be given posts in China unless your research is novel and you have delivered results,” he said.

Nowada said that had he stayed in Japan, he would not have published as many research articles.

“I hope young Japanese scientists will think of China as one optional destination on the understanding that competition is tough in the country,” he said.

JAPAN FALLING BEHIND IN RANKINGS

Japan and China have switched places when it comes to their presence in the world of science over the past 20 years.

An education ministry study found China overtook the United States in recent years to become the world’s top publisher of research papers and the country with the highest number of high-quality papers with citation counts in the top 10 percent.

apan ranked fourth in terms of the number of top 10 percent articles 20 years ago. It fell to sixth place 10 years ago, and the latest survey from 2022 found it had fallen out of the top 10 nations to rank 12th.

Japan’s decline in research abilities is blamed partly on the nation’s “selection and concentration” policy, where it invests intensively in only a few research fields because of limited funds.

Budgets tend to be focused on a limited set of universities, and scientists find it particularly hard to obtain grants in basic research fields.

Government subsidies for the operating costs of national universities, which are used to cover personnel, have either continued to shrink or, at best, have not improved. Young scientists are hard-pressed to land permanent posts.

Fewer researchers are obtaining Ph.D.s because of the uncertainty about the future.

Education ministry figures show the annual number of Ph.D.s obtained in Japan peaked at 17,860 in fiscal 2006 and has hovered around 15,000 in recent years. The number of Ph.D.s obtained in China skyrocketed from 26,506 in fiscal 2005 to 65,585 in fiscal 2020—an increase of about 150 percent.

Japan has set a goal of becoming a leader in science and technology, but its rank will only decline further if the scientist brain drain accelerates.

China is investing aggressively in science and technology, with research and development expenses in the country reaching 59 trillion yen in 2020, making it second in the world only to the United States. Japan only spent 17.6 trillion yen.

Basic research spending in China is also rising. In 1991, it was less than one-20th of Japan’s amount. In 2020, it reached 3.5 trillion yen—exceeding Japan’s 2.7 trillion yen.

The spectacular growth of China is often attributed to its abundant personnel and research funding.

But an expert on China’s approach to science, Atsushi Sunami, president of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, said institutional arrangement is key before everything else.

China pressed ahead with university reforms on the government’s initiative and gave considerable discretion to members of university management, including presidents.

That created an environment that allows free research, where even young scientists have opportunities to be promoted and to win research grants if they are competent, Sunami said.

The country is also aggressively luring excellent researchers who have studied abroad.

It is unknown, however, whether China will be able to remain so competitive in the shadow of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing.

“I feel that China’s research environment is undergoing a major change because the state and its political circles have started intervening in freedom of speech,” Sunami said. “I am also worried about the extent to which the country’s ‘zero-COVID’ policy, which entailed extremely strict regulations, and other factors have influenced the research environment.”

Scientists leave Japan for China, wooed by better teamwork, jobs | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

 

[uhuru]

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[QinGua1949]

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[uhuru]

And you're a stalker


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[QinGua1949]

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