For a long time, the U.S. led the world in the number of scientific research papers published and the number of citations that these papers racked up. While the volume of papers published by the researchers of a country alone doesn’t imply a higher chance of winning a Nobel Prize, it still suggests the presence of a productive research establishment. This said, scholars have also devised ways to measure research output that also says something about its quality. On these measures too, the U.S. has been leading all other countries. But this dominance seems to be slipping.
For more than half a decade now, Chinese researchers, or researchers whose primary affiliation is a China-based institution, have been publishing more papers than those in the U.S.
Chart 1 | The chart shows the papers published in science and engineering conferences and peer-reviewed journals indexed in the Scopus database. India is currently third on this list.
