China's rise as global scientific powerhouse: A trajectory of international collaboration and specialization in high-impact research

Niccolò Pisani, Hanjo D. Boekhout, Eelke M. Heemskerk and Frank W. Takes

Research Policy, 2025, vol. 54, issue 8

Abstract: The recent and rapid ascent of China into today's scientific powerhouse is increasingly debated in circles of economic politics and policy making. Yet, we still know relatively little how such rise has materialized in terms of Chinese scientists' openness to international collaborations and relative focus on high-impact research, particularly in relation to the U.S. Leveraging a unique, curated database of over 25 million scientific publications from 2008 until 2020, we aim to fill this gap and empirically investigate: (1) the extent to which collaboration of China-based researchers with scientists from other countries has materialized; (2) how competition in producing high-impact research has evolved for China, especially vis-à-vis the U.S., in the global production of science; and (3) whether specialization in well-defined fields has characterized China's ascent in science and, if so, in which areas. Our findings show that China's rise as a leading player in global science has importantly built on opening its knowledge production to collaboration, both domestically and internationally. This has been paired with a remarkable focus on high-impact research. Recently, China has entirely closed the gap with the U.S. in terms of contribution to the global top 1 % high-impact scientific production, specializing in four key fields – engineering/electrical/electronic, materials science, physics, and chemistry. Our study sheds new light on the changing landscape of global scientific production and opens several avenues for future research.

Keywords: Scientific research; International collaboration; High-impact research; Geography of science; Global research teams; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733325001179
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:54:y:2025:i:8:s0048733325001179

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2025.105288

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by Anna Bergek, PhD, Alex Coad, PhD, Maryann Feldman, Elisa Giuliani, Adam B. Jaffe, Martin Kenney, Keun Lee, PhD, Ben Martin, MA, MSc, Kazuyuki Motohashi, Paul Nightingale, Ammon Salter, Maria Savona, Reinhilde Veugelers and John Walsh

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().