China is emerging as a leading research nation across a wide range of disciplines, with more original innovations being published in journals by the Netherlands-based publishing company Elsevier, Laura Hassink, Managing Director for Scientific, Technical and Medical Journals at Elsevier, said. Some of the research has been groundbreaking as decades of investment in basic and fundamental studies have begun to pay off, and more advances are expected, she said. “We definitely see a growing number of research articles from China these years. What’s even more important, we see that the quality continues to increase, making the impact of the Chinese published articles grow. That echoes the high-quality research being done in China,” Hassink said. “Such an increase in both quality and quantity from Chinese research projects is rarely seen in other parts of the world at the moment,” she said during the Pujiang Innovation Forum, held in September in Shanghai, where Elsevier was an academic strategic partner.
International collaboration has been a key driver in China’s systematic improvement in research quality, Hassink said. China began to expand international research collaboration about a decade ago, and “what we see in general is that the more international, the better a research usually is,” she said. One notable example was a report on combating liver cancer, led by Chinese experts and published in The Lancet in July. The report involved more than 50 specialists from countries and regions that include Japan, South Korea, the United States, Spain, France and Italy. “It was the first time in the journal’s more than two-century history that it had invited Chinese scholars to lead a cancer-related commission to address a major global health challenge,” Hassink said, adding that China is also strong in fields such as physical science, material science and artificial intelligence (AI).
Data from Elsevier showed that China’s research output published in the top 1% of high-impact journals achieved a compound annual growth rate of 26% over the past five years. The country’s field-weighted citation impact has also consistently remained above the global average. “Something the Chinese local governments are doing really well is that they have made scientific research a priority years ago and have been fairly steadfast to reach the ambitions at the end of the day,” Hassink said. China’s investment in funding and its strategic approach to allocating resources are also impressive, she added. Different universities are designated focus areas, which allows them to advance science in specialized fields, the China Daily reports.
