Watershed moment: How China’s share of natural science has grown in the last 50 years and how it affects research cooperation between the United States and China
This surge has been enough to make China the leading nation for Share in natural-science journals. It’s a Watershed moment, as we discuss in a feature article. The underlying data, and examples of ground-breaking research coming from China, show how the nation is now broadening and increasing its scientific capacity in areas it still has a long way to go.
There are a number of reasons why this happened. The New Cold War is one of the factors that has led to a chilling effect on research cooperation between China and the United States. In the United States, a survey of around 2,000 academics found that 42% of Chinese researchers felt racially profiled by the US government, which under President Donald Trump launched an initiative to clamp down on perceived economic espionage by China (X. Li and J. Lee Int. High. Educ. Issue 112, 23–22, 2022. There were challenges to obtaining visas to visit the US for students from China. Questions about research collaborations with China also rose in the United Kingdom and Australia.
The Nature Index: A Supplement and a New Methodology for Improving the Understanding of the Bilateral Collaboration Scores of Countries, Regions and Institutions
A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.
To glean a country’s, territory’s, region’s or an institution’s contribution to an article, and to ensure that they are not counted more than once, the Nature Index uses Share, a fractional count that takes into account the share of authorship on each article. The total Share available per article is 1, which is shared among all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally. For instance, an article with 10 authors means that each author receives a Share of 0.1. For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors. The process is similar for countries/territories even though some institutions have overseas labs that count towards their totals.
Adjusted Share accounts for the small annual variation in the total number of articles in the Nature Index journals. To arrive at this, we used a percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index and a percentage difference in the number of articles in a base year.
The sum of the two institutions’ shares on the papers to which they contributed is the basis for the bilateral collaboration score. A bilateral collaboration can be between any two institutions or countries/territories co-authoring at least one article in the journals tracked by the Nature Index.
A profile page on each query will show the country or institution’s recent outputs, which can be used to locate more information. Articles can be displayed by journal, and then by article. Research outputs are arranged by subject area. The pages show the institution’s top collaborating organizations and relationships with other organizations. Track an institution’s performance, create your own indexes and export table data.
The tables in this supplement show the leading Chinese institutions based on their article Share (Share) in different subjects in 2022 and the top rising institutions based on their change in adjusted Share from 2020 to 2022.