The concept of “made in China” left the industry and reached research institutions. Unpublished survey of leaf shows that Chinese scientific production has reached the highest mark in the world — surpassing the United States in an unprecedented way.
Scientists linked to universities, institutes and hospitals in China published a sum of 788,000 scientific articles in 2020 in all areas of knowledge. That’s 90 new scientific results per hour, on average, published in academic papers with Chinese participation.
The brand led the country to surpass the then leader in the United States, with 767,000 scientific articles published in 2020. It was a 2.4% higher number compared to the previous year; the point is that Chinese scientific production grew by 10% in the same period — this after increasing non-stop in recent years.
The data were extracted from the Scimago platform, which includes metrics from more than 20,000 scientific journals from a database called Scopus. Academic papers published in these journals come into account after review and approval by scientists (which is called “peer review”). They are, therefore, “official” academic publications.
In 2020, China leads areas of knowledge such as molecular biology and pharmacology — more directly linked to Covid-19’s coping research —, but it also ranks 1st in the world in topics such as astronomy, agriculture, computer science and engineering.
He also does well in studies in economics (2nd place in the world) and in the arts and humanities, in which he occupies 6th position in the world.
The numbers are impressive because two decades ago Chinese scientific production was almost six times smaller than that of the United States. In 2001, the US had published 373,500 scientific articles—compared to 65.6 thousand in China.
At that time, an intense policy to encourage higher education was gaining strength in China, which began in the previous decade and which is showing results now. “China has invested a lot in research and development,” says sociologist Adriana Abdenur. She is an expert in public policy and international relations, and has worked at Chinese universities.
There, there are several policies for promoting and evaluating research careers, often with salary increases linked to scientific production. “In a way, it is an adoption of the Western model of academic performance evaluation”, he says.
The country has also begun to invest heavily in a group of research-excellent Chinese universities — a sort of “Chinese ivy league”. Today, two of these universities are among the best in the world: Beijing and Tsinghua are tied for 16th place in the latest edition of the global university ranking THE (Times Higher Education).
A decade ago, Beijing and Tsinghua universities were, respectively, 46th and 52nd in the world in the same listing as THE.
The internationalization of higher education is also a strong component of Chinese state policy. “There is a sending of students abroad with a very well-defined orientation towards learning the methods and dynamics of the great global centers”, says Abdenur.
These students, explains the expert, end up returning to China fluent in English, the lingua franca of science. This, of course, contributes to the increase in scientific production in that country.
According to the latest report by the US Institute of International Education (IIE), 35% of the nearly 1 million foreign students enrolled in US universities had come from China in the 2020-2021 school year. Next is India, with 18% of foreign students from that country.
In terms of visibility, Chinese and US academic production are practically tied. One of the metrics to measure this is the number of times a scientific article is mentioned by other academic works. Chinese and North American works published in 2020 were cited 1.2 times each that same year.
In academic corridors, however, there is talk of a “scientific article factory” in China as a way to inflate the data. Cases of academic productions based, for example, on false data have already surfaced. The complaints, however, were not exclusive to China.
Data from Scimago show that Brazilian science has also grown — but at a much more modest pace than China’s.
Brazil occupies 13th place in the world in the same ranking of scientific production in 2020, with a record 100 thousand academic papers published in scientific journals. It was an increase of 9.34% over the previous year.
And how is it possible for Brazilian science to grow if investments in research are decreasing?
“The scientific production of 2020 still reflects the investments made in 2019 behind. It takes time for cuts in funding for science to have a strong effect on scientific production”, says Leandro Tessler, a physicist at Unicamp who has been closely following data on scientific production Brazilian.
Federal resources for Brazilian science —unlike China— have been drastically cut for some years. The budget of CNPq, the federal agency responsible for the payment of scholarships to graduate students (a kind of salary), for example, went from BRL 3.14 billion, in 2013, to BRL 1.21 billion this year — and it can get even smaller in 2022.
“The cuts in research grants should have consequences for scientific production in the coming years”, says Tessler.
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