(PHOTO: VCG)

By LIN Yuchen

The latest Nature Index data show that Chinese authors made the greatest contribution to high-quality natural science research in 2022, ranking first for the first time in terms of share of publications in high-quality journals, surpassing the United States.

The Nature Index is produced and published regularly by Springer Nature Publishing Group, a leading international science and technology publisher. It tracks scientific papers published in 82 high-quality journals and reflects the global high quality research output and collaboration based on the number and proportion of papers published by the relevant institutions, countries or regions.

A paper published entirely by Chinese researchers will bring 1 "share" in the index to China. According to the Nature Index analysis, from January to December 2022, Chinese authors ranked first with 19,373 "shares" of contributions, compared to 17,610 for the United States.

Since the Nature Index was first introduced in 2014, China's "share" has increased rapidly. China has become the leading country in physical sciences and chemistry in 2021. The latest data from January to April 2023 show that China has also surpassed the U.S. in earth and environmental sciences for the first time. Currently, the U.S. ranks first only in the "share" of life sciences category.

In recent years, several measures of research performance have shown a shift in the share of global research contributions. For example, a 2018 National Science Foundation dataset shows that China published the most papers that year, and a 2022 report from Japan's National Institute for Science and Technology Policy says that between 2018 and 2020, China accounted for a more share of the top 1% of most-cited papers than the U.S.

The Nature Index also shows that the total number of scientific papers in 2022 was nearly 25,200 in the U.S. and more than 23,500 in China, based on the original sum of all articles with at least one author from a specific country/region.