By: R. D. Shelton and P. Foland

The US and EU have been vying for leadership of science and technology; now they are being overtaken by the People's Republic of China. The US is now leading in most input indicators, but the EU has taken the lead in important outputs. While the PRC remains behind in most indicators, its incredible progress from being underdeveloped during the Cultural Revolution to being a contender in this race is almost unprecedented. Qualitative assessment of fields of research and development, based on recent expert review studies, confirm that many Chinese labs have made rapid progress. Extrapolations from the current status and recent rates of change suggest that China will soon rival the others as a scientific superpower in many indicators. Further, a formal forecast of national publication shares can now be made, perhaps for the first time. The input to the model is a country’s share of world R&D investment. If current trends in investment continue, the US and EU are forecast to continue to decline, while the PRC is expected to near parity with them within ten years in the Science Citation Index. Some confirmation comes from other databases—China has already passed the US in Inspec and Compendex.

Since the 1950s, the top science goal of the U. S. Government has been “maintaining world leadership in science, mathematics, and engineering,” and there is wide acceptance in the US of the premise that it remains ahead. Much of this confidence seems to depend on the US's spending more money on R&D than others. Even so, the US does lead the world in many science and technology (S&T) indicators when compared to much smaller single countries, but the emergence of a more coordinated European Union makes comparisons with the EU as a whole more realistic.

In 2000 the EU set a goal of becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. Strategies are being implemented to achieve this goal, including the tighter integration of research and development (R&D) activities into a European Research Area. While efforts to meet the EU goal to increase its investment to 3% of GDP by 2010 have been delayed, even this attempt compares favorably to the US, which has no national plan at all.

The PRC has plenty of plans, the most recent was the Mid- to Long-Term S&T Development Plan (2006 – 2020), which set a goal of doubling national R&D investment intensity to 2.5% of GDP by 2020--and that GDP has been growing at 10% or more for many years (State Council, 2006). Further, such goals are likely to be met, because the PRC has the resources and the national will to implement them, and because they merely represent a continuation of a long record of more than 15% annual increases in R&D investment. Even the 2008-9 financial crisis is not likely to derail this progress; at this writing, China claims to be continuing to grow fairly rapidly even as almost all other nations fall into recession.

Some bibliometricians were alert to China’s sudden advance, and its rapid progress in output indicators like publications was documented early by Moed (2002), Jin and Rousseau (2005), and by Leydendorf and Zhou (2005). Indeed, this represents a success for the scientometrics community in detecting a global shift in science long before it became apparent to policy makers. Zhou and Leydesdorff (2006) have analyzed publications and citations to make the case that China must be already be considered a leading nation in science, particularly in nanotechnology.

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