2021/11/25
Deciphering the Structure of the U.S.-China Conflict over Science and Technology -- On the Trends in China's Science and Technology -- by KURASAWA Haruo (Member of Japanese Association of Science & Technology Journalists )
The results of science and technology are published in the form of academic papers. The number of published papers is an extremely powerful indicator of a country's scientific and technological capabilities. Until around the year 2000, the number of papers published in China was only about one-sixth of that in the U.S. However, according to data from the Dutch publisher Elsevier B.V.'s Scopus database of papers and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), China surpassed Japan in 2004 and finally overtook the U.S. to take the top spot of published papers in 2018. Extrapolating the rate of increase, there is no doubt that the gap between China and the U.S. in terms of numbers will widen in the future.
