China has surpassed the US as the largest single-country producer of materials science research papers, according to a study released on 27 June by Thomson Reuters.
The report found that China has produced more than 55,000 research papers on the subject in the last five years—a dramatic increase from the 50 papers it published in 1981. The US produced about about 38,000 papers in the same five-year period.
The analysis further found that the US’ world share of publications in this field has fallen by nearly half since the early 1980s, with a similar decline in the European Union.
Thomson Reuters’ director of research evaluation, Jonathan Adams, pointed out that although US research output has dwindled, its materials science papers are on average still cited twice as often as those from China. This statistic provides “a reasonable indicator” of the influence and significance of the research emanating from the US, he said.
Adams said that experience was creating expertise among thousands of new materials researchers in Asia, and the gap in citation impact between Asia on the one hand and Europe and North America on the other was “starting to close.”