8 ms·

China overtakes United States on contribution to research in Nature Index

44 points by eunos 3y ago

sebmellen 3y ago
This seems more important: > between 2018 and 2020, Chinese research comprised more of the top 1% of the most frequently cited papers than did US research.
- nerbert 3y ago
  Does that include the "citation growth hacking" operated by the Chinese academic sector?
alephnerd 3y ago
The drop in 2020 seems to corralate with the Visa Renewal backlog that began during the pandemic. I know a lot of very technically adept Chinese+Indian researchers who ended up taking positions back in top Chinese and Indian Universities+Companies+Govt Labs due to this. Edit: Digging deeper, it looks like Nature treats the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Chinese version of US DoE National Labs) as a single institution. I'd be curious how the US stacks up if National Lab affiliation was included in the same manner. Lots of R&D done by National Lab researchers are affiliated only with their Lab, not a university. Also a lot of naturalized American academics can also get Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliation due to the murkiness of Chinese nationality renunciation, so that might muddy it further (eg. If I'm an academic at Harvard University with an affiliation to the CAS, which relationship does the Nature Index treat as the primary?) Edit 2: from the Nature Index itself "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." So, if a researcher at Harvard or MIT or Cal is also cross affiliated with the CAS or Tsinghua, their research output would be split equally, even if the relationship is an adjunct one with one or the other. This sounds like the same kind of statistical gaming NUS and NTU in Singapore and KAUST in Saudi Arabia are famous for to climb up global university rankings.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  Once we step out of the American bubble, it is very clear that American research is top notch, but other countries have basically caught up. America just doesn't attract (or retain) the best. Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > it is very clear that American research is top notch, but other countries have basically caught up. I agree. The last time we've seen a similar parity in R&D capacity was probably the 1950s-1960s. That said, a lot of discourse around geopolitical rivalries is kind of stuck in a pre-1990s mindset. Even at its worst, countries with actual military disputes continue to be closely economically connected and (excluding Russia over the past year) we haven't seen the kind of economic decoupling that we saw in the 1970s-90s globally. So long as nations globally maintain diplomatic contact and continue to be connected via diasporas and economic relations, there is always an off-ramp for political disputes. P.S. Do NOT quote Russia as a counter example to my final example. Russia has been under severe EU+USA sanctions since 2014. The only difference is that these sanctions did not extend to Belarus until 2022, which was used as a backdoor to maintain EU-Russia economic relations.
    - coliveira 3y ago
      I would say that the decoupling has been more from the side of US/Europe than the rest of the world. Asia, Africa and South America are becoming more strongly connected. That's why the Russian sanction didn't work (and won't work in the future).
  - warning26 3y ago
    > Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense. I find it utterly baffling that the US is in a position to easily absorb the best and brightest from other countries, and yet shoots itself in the foot with ridiculously restrictive immigration policies.
api 3y ago
There are 4X as many Chinese than Americans. All they have to do is be more than 1/4 as productive to overtake the US on a national comparison basis in many areas. Not sure how much it truly matters though. Per capita is more meaningful.
- gsatic 3y ago
  Info overload and the hype (attention) economy will neutralize gains on all sides.
- questime 3y ago
  There are 100000x more potential Americans than potential Chinese living today, a lot of whom are currently in China waiting to get out.
  - dirtyid 3y ago
    There's roughly comparable English speakers US can draw from on Earth as Mandarin speakers in PRC, around 1B each. US recruiting from world is a dumb meme. Except PRC can retain most of talent since net emigration and US immigration / brain drain specifically can only absorb fraction vs numbers that stay in PRC. Drop in bucket really. The numbers game massively favours PRC right now, beside which PRC aren't even sending predominantly their best anymore. Most of kids going abroad are B tier students who couldn't hack it in PRC system. Unlike before 2010s where best from PRC goes abroad since no opportunity at home. That's different now and largely why PRC climbing all the academic and innovation indexes fast.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      The issue is that it’s a world market for top talent, and how many Indian computer scientists are moving to China rather than Europe or the UK? The best in the PRC is usually just the best from the PRC, that isn’t true in the west (the best may not be and often isn’t from the west).
      - dirtyid 3y ago
mensetmanusman 3y ago
The more the merrier!
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
wutheringh 3y ago
[dead]
fma 3y ago
Our best and brightest can make more money with FANG or banking induary than contributing to science. My wife with a PhD in Chemistry from a prestigious university started her own unrelated business due to lack of jobs and avoiding the slog of doing post doc. This would all naturally catch up with us. The US revolves around capitalism. Make it more financially rewarding to contribute to science and we'll again be #1 in Nature.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  It's the same thing elsewhere as well. As I noted below, the Nature Index has a number of flaws in how it measures affiliation.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  Also, we can shift away from a culture and polity that worships Mammon. Generally speaking, people simply go with the grain of the culture, regardless of whether that grain is crooked or straight. If the culture reduces life to economics and makes consumerism its religion, then yeah, you'll see lots of people who would have chosen less lucrative paths choose work that pays more. What's worrying about finance and FANG pulling in a good chunk of the STEM majors is that finance is not a productive sector, and arguably, FANG isn't really all that productive either, certainly not relative to the economic bias. You need sectors like finance, of course, because they are the way capital is allocated toward productive labor, but the only way unproductive or marginally productive sectors can make this much money without funding and investing in productive industry is through usury. Usury is the ruin of empires.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Agree about usury and all (I think mortgages should probably be illegal), but is consumerism really a big driver of high earners continuing to focus on high earning as opposed to more altruistic research? I feel like keeping up with the Jones’ maxes out at a level that, while much higher than the median income, is not that high among the incomes of geniuses wasting their potential at tech companies. The treadmill feels much much much more about status and future freedom than about consumption itself (granted some consumption is status signaling in nature).
chestertn 3y ago
Publishing is a social activity. And, today, a bad metric to measure research success. It has been hijacked by careerists and mafiosi.
echevil 3y ago
A great milestone! Congrats
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I love that you were downvoted ha
negermeister 3y ago
[flagged]
ftxbro 3y ago
> "when measured on “simple bibliometrics like productivity and citations, China has outperformed expectations”. She adds, however, that it still “significantly trails” behind other nations “in its capacity to absorb and apply knowledge”" > "The thing that differentiates the United States from China is the depth of US capability across the board, whatever the field might be." these sound like some cope
- peteradio 3y ago
  Looking at high level numbers like citations is the cope. For instance, an individual researcher can have very high h-index scores while it would give no indication the relative merit of another researcher who has h-index score 1/100 of the original. The numbers are so context dependent as to become meaningless in almost all comparisons.
ftxbro 3y ago
imagine we spend one small fraction as much time doing important research as doing culture wars or doing or preparing actual wars
aguara_guazu 3y ago
[flagged]
coliveira 3y ago
Congrats to the Chinese, that's how we maintain a healthy competition. People in USA should take this as a sign they need to step up their game and invest more in science.
- eunos 3y ago
  Congress and people at large will interpret it as yet another Beijing conspiracy or some bullshit.
dirtyid 3y ago
Keep in mind this is lagging indicator of 00s PRC academic reforms where PRC institution building and adding millions more talent into academia. There's been magnitude increase in talent generation, ~5m STEM per year for last several years or roughly OECD combined that's making their way through pipeline while tertiary system continues to expand and improve. I surmise these indexes will get increasingly lopsided going forward.

44 points by eunos 3y ago

This seems more important: > between 2018 and 2020, Chinese research comprised more of the top 1% of the most frequently cited papers than did US research.

nerbert 3y ago
Does that include the "citation growth hacking" operated by the Chinese academic sector?

alephnerd 3y ago

The drop in 2020 seems to corralate with the Visa Renewal backlog that began during the pandemic. I know a lot of very technically adept Chinese+Indian researchers who ended up taking positions back in top Chinese and Indian Universities+Companies+Govt Labs due to this. Edit: Digging deeper, it looks like Nature treats the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Chinese version of US DoE National Labs) as a single institution. I'd be curious how the US stacks up if National Lab affiliation was included in the same manner. Lots of R&D done by National Lab researchers are affiliated only with their Lab, not a university. Also a lot of naturalized American academics can also get Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliation due to the murkiness of Chinese nationality renunciation, so that might muddy it further (eg. If I'm an academic at Harvard University with an affiliation to the CAS, which relationship does the Nature Index treat as the primary?) Edit 2: from the Nature Index itself "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." So, if a researcher at Harvard or MIT or Cal is also cross affiliated with the CAS or Tsinghua, their research output would be split equally, even if the relationship is an adjunct one with one or the other. This sounds like the same kind of statistical gaming NUS and NTU in Singapore and KAUST in Saudi Arabia are famous for to climb up global university rankings.

nine_zeros 3y ago
Once we step out of the American bubble, it is very clear that American research is top notch, but other countries have basically caught up. America just doesn't attract (or retain) the best. Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > it is very clear that American research is top notch, but other countries have basically caught up. I agree. The last time we've seen a similar parity in R&D capacity was probably the 1950s-1960s. That said, a lot of discourse around geopolitical rivalries is kind of stuck in a pre-1990s mindset. Even at its worst, countries with actual military disputes continue to be closely economically connected and (excluding Russia over the past year) we haven't seen the kind of economic decoupling that we saw in the 1970s-90s globally. So long as nations globally maintain diplomatic contact and continue to be connected via diasporas and economic relations, there is always an off-ramp for political disputes. P.S. Do NOT quote Russia as a counter example to my final example. Russia has been under severe EU+USA sanctions since 2014. The only difference is that these sanctions did not extend to Belarus until 2022, which was used as a backdoor to maintain EU-Russia economic relations.
  - coliveira 3y ago
    I would say that the decoupling has been more from the side of US/Europe than the rest of the world. Asia, Africa and South America are becoming more strongly connected. That's why the Russian sanction didn't work (and won't work in the future).
- warning26 3y ago
  > Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense. I find it utterly baffling that the US is in a position to easily absorb the best and brightest from other countries, and yet shoots itself in the foot with ridiculously restrictive immigration policies.

api 3y ago

There are 4X as many Chinese than Americans. All they have to do is be more than 1/4 as productive to overtake the US on a national comparison basis in many areas. Not sure how much it truly matters though. Per capita is more meaningful.

gsatic 3y ago
Info overload and the hype (attention) economy will neutralize gains on all sides.
questime 3y ago
There are 100000x more potential Americans than potential Chinese living today, a lot of whom are currently in China waiting to get out.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  There's roughly comparable English speakers US can draw from on Earth as Mandarin speakers in PRC, around 1B each. US recruiting from world is a dumb meme. Except PRC can retain most of talent since net emigration and US immigration / brain drain specifically can only absorb fraction vs numbers that stay in PRC. Drop in bucket really. The numbers game massively favours PRC right now, beside which PRC aren't even sending predominantly their best anymore. Most of kids going abroad are B tier students who couldn't hack it in PRC system. Unlike before 2010s where best from PRC goes abroad since no opportunity at home. That's different now and largely why PRC climbing all the academic and innovation indexes fast.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    The issue is that it’s a world market for top talent, and how many Indian computer scientists are moving to China rather than Europe or the UK? The best in the PRC is usually just the best from the PRC, that isn’t true in the west (the best may not be and often isn’t from the west).
    - dirtyid 3y ago

mensetmanusman 3y ago

The more the merrier!

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

wutheringh 3y ago

[dead]

fma 3y ago

Our best and brightest can make more money with FANG or banking induary than contributing to science. My wife with a PhD in Chemistry from a prestigious university started her own unrelated business due to lack of jobs and avoiding the slog of doing post doc. This would all naturally catch up with us. The US revolves around capitalism. Make it more financially rewarding to contribute to science and we'll again be #1 in Nature.

alephnerd 3y ago
It's the same thing elsewhere as well. As I noted below, the Nature Index has a number of flaws in how it measures affiliation.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Also, we can shift away from a culture and polity that worships Mammon. Generally speaking, people simply go with the grain of the culture, regardless of whether that grain is crooked or straight. If the culture reduces life to economics and makes consumerism its religion, then yeah, you'll see lots of people who would have chosen less lucrative paths choose work that pays more. What's worrying about finance and FANG pulling in a good chunk of the STEM majors is that finance is not a productive sector, and arguably, FANG isn't really all that productive either, certainly not relative to the economic bias. You need sectors like finance, of course, because they are the way capital is allocated toward productive labor, but the only way unproductive or marginally productive sectors can make this much money without funding and investing in productive industry is through usury. Usury is the ruin of empires.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Agree about usury and all (I think mortgages should probably be illegal), but is consumerism really a big driver of high earners continuing to focus on high earning as opposed to more altruistic research? I feel like keeping up with the Jones’ maxes out at a level that, while much higher than the median income, is not that high among the incomes of geniuses wasting their potential at tech companies. The treadmill feels much much much more about status and future freedom than about consumption itself (granted some consumption is status signaling in nature).

chestertn 3y ago

Publishing is a social activity. And, today, a bad metric to measure research success. It has been hijacked by careerists and mafiosi.

echevil 3y ago

A great milestone! Congrats

ChatGTP 3y ago
I love that you were downvoted ha

negermeister 3y ago

[flagged]

ftxbro 3y ago

> "when measured on “simple bibliometrics like productivity and citations, China has outperformed expectations”. She adds, however, that it still “significantly trails” behind other nations “in its capacity to absorb and apply knowledge”" > "The thing that differentiates the United States from China is the depth of US capability across the board, whatever the field might be." these sound like some cope

peteradio 3y ago
Looking at high level numbers like citations is the cope. For instance, an individual researcher can have very high h-index scores while it would give no indication the relative merit of another researcher who has h-index score 1/100 of the original. The numbers are so context dependent as to become meaningless in almost all comparisons.

ftxbro 3y ago

imagine we spend one small fraction as much time doing important research as doing culture wars or doing or preparing actual wars

aguara_guazu 3y ago

[flagged]

coliveira 3y ago

Congrats to the Chinese, that's how we maintain a healthy competition. People in USA should take this as a sign they need to step up their game and invest more in science.

eunos 3y ago
Congress and people at large will interpret it as yet another Beijing conspiracy or some bullshit.

dirtyid 3y ago

Keep in mind this is lagging indicator of 00s PRC academic reforms where PRC institution building and adding millions more talent into academia. There's been magnitude increase in talent generation, ~5m STEM per year for last several years or roughly OECD combined that's making their way through pipeline while tertiary system continues to expand and improve. I surmise these indexes will get increasingly lopsided going forward.