Agreed. These couple of sentences deflate the click-baity title a bit: "The report echoes my earlier observations: lots of new countries are become scientific

Agreed. These couple of sentences deflate the click-baity title a bit: "The report echoes my earlier observations: lots of new countries are become scientific powers in terms of publication output, with China leading the charge. The major claim made by the report is that developed countries continue to dominate in terms of highly cited publications." The trend the article is talking about is China is catching up in terms of publication output. I've heard elsewhere that in Chinese universities things like tenure, promotions etc. are heavily weighted by publication output - perhaps without much respect for the research quality. I could see some fields/journals becoming echo chambers where researchers spam publications without actually making meaningful technical accomplishments. That's probably what we're seeing.