the Flipping happening, and is bullish / bearish, depending on PoV, and Team Trump shall rejuvenate acceleration of trend already in place, am guessing
scmp.com
China surpasses US in tally of top scientists for the first time: report
Updated: 12:50pm, 17 Jan 2025
While the number of leading scientists in America is falling, the number in China is only going up, according to new data
China has overtaken the United States for the first time in the number of its high-level science and technology experts, according to a new report.
Analysing data for the five years from 2020 to 2024, the report also shows that the number of top scientists in China has risen, while the number in the US has fallen.
According to the report released by Shenzhen-based data technology firm Dongbi Data on January 11, there were 36,599 world-leading scientists in the US in 2020, a total that declined each year to 31,781 in 2024. Over that time, America’s share of the global talent pool dropped from nearly 33 per cent to 27 per cent.
In contrast, the number of leading scientists in China increased from 18,805 in 2020 to 32,511 in 2024, with its global share rising from 17 per cent to 28 per cent.
For the purposes of the study, a “high-level science and technology talent” was defined as any researcher who had published influential papers in the world’s top journals.
The team behind the report sampled more than 40,000 highly cited key papers published between 2020 and 2024 in 129 top international academic journals across a range of disciplines, then extracted information about the authors and collated the data.
Wu Dengsheng, founder of Dongbi Data and professor at Shenzhen University’s college of management, said the analysis showed just how much the sector was changing worldwide.
“Over the past five years, the global landscape of high-level science and technology talent has undergone profound changes,” Wu said.
China’s push to advance its science and technology sector has seen the number of leading scientists grow over the last five years, while many other Western countries have seen declines in numbers. Photo: Xinhua
“China and the US are consistently dominating, but with diametrically opposed trends.”
In terms of distribution, China’s top scientists were concentrated on the country’s east coast and in first-tier cities, while America’s were mainly clustered in universities and research institutes in California and Massachusetts.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is the world’s largest scientific organisation with more than 100 institutes across China, topped the list with 3,615 leading scientists. This was far ahead of Harvard University with 1,683 and Stanford University with 1,208.
Outside the US and China, the number of top scientists in Germanyremained relatively stable over the five-year period, revealing only a slight decline, while Britain and France both showed a downward trend. Japan and Australia also saw declines in both the number and global percentage of leading scientists.
The report’s findings, along with results from other similar analysis, point to a shift in scientific strength between the US and China in recent years.
According to a report released in 2023 by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China under the Ministry of Science and Technology, China contributed nearly one-third of the academic papers published in the most influential international journals in 2022. It was the first time that China had overtaken the US to secure the top position globally.
Also, in the latest issue of Nature – one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific journals in the West – published on January 8, almost half of the studies featured work by ethnic Chinese researchers.
Dongbi Data also released its Global Top Journals List Across All Disciplines, which aims to select and rank international academic journals.
Wu noted that most scientific literature database platforms that Chinese researchers had long used were from the West, including the Science Citation Index, one of the main international benchmarks of journals.
He said he hoped the release of the new list created by Chinese scientists would break the reliance on international evaluation systems in China’s scientific community.
Li Gang, dean of the Wuhan Data Intelligence Research Institute at Wuhan University, who was involved in the development of the list, stressed that the establishment of a rating system was actually a matter of narrative power in international academia.
“China has long lacked an influential and internationally recognised journal list,” Li said.
He said the new index could encourage international researchers to accept Chinese academic publications and therefore play a fundamental role in supporting the country’s scientific and technological development. |
