China – World’s Largest Producer of Scientific Articles

The Financial Times published “China’s AI ambitions revealed by most cited research papers” at the end of last year and two Chinese universities entered the top 10 – The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Tsinghua University. The only other Asian university in the top 10 was Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. According to statistics compiled by the US government’s National Science Foundation (NSF), China published more than 426,000 studies in 2016 (18.6% of the total documented in Elsevier’s Scopus database).

In addition, this NSF release noted that India has also surpassed Japan in terms of quantity, while China has surpassed the USA. Xinhua Guangzhou recently quoted an unnamed source from the Greater China subsidiary of the publisher Springer Nature, stating that “China has become the largest contributor to original research papers in Nature; Chinese researchers published more than 90 original research papers in Nature in 2016, accounting for about 11 % of all papers.”