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 Thomson Reuters 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.

Table 2 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: Thomson Reuters 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 Thomson Reuters-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 Thomson Reuters-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 Indicators^SM, 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.

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Table 1

China's Research Output by Field
(Ranked by share of world literature, 2003-07)

^Top

Christopher King is the Editor of the Science Watch^® Newsletter.

Keywords: People’s Republic of China, China, PRC, science in China, Chinese science, research in China, Chinese researchers, SARS, J.S.M. Peiris.