Charting Asia’s Research Ascendancy

In 1996, only five years after the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies made up all five of the most industrious creators of scientific knowledge. This past January, however, China made headlines as its publication rate surpassed that of the United States. According to the National Science Foundation and MIT Technology Review, China published 426,000 research papers in 2016 compared to the 409,000 published in the United States.

U.S. leadership in scientific research since the turn of the 20th century allowed it to be the first to develop the nuclear bomb and land a man on the moon. Its innovative technological research and development unequivocally boosted the U.S. economy. But the gap between the United States and the rest of the world is quickly closing, especially with the recent rapid growth of Asia’s research capacity.

To help understand the extent of Asia’s ascent, I used a novel dataset amalgamated from SCImago and standardized by country by year, using scientific output by country as a proxy for a country’s technological capability. The primary metric I use is citations: The number of times a certain paper is referenced by other papers (generally the more citations a paper accrues, the greater its influence). Instead of using total documents produced, I use a country’s relative citation rank vis-à-vis the rest of the world, because not all documents have the same level of innovation and impact.

Looking the citation rankings for the top 15 countries, China’s meteoric rise since 1996, the first year included in the dataset, is clear. So too are India and South Korea’s leaps. Perhaps most notably, many of the “old powers” of the 20th century were displaced in the reshuffling of the country rankings: The United Kingdom, France, and Italy all fell at least one position.