According to a survey released on Wednesday, China overcame the United States to take the top position worldwide in 2022 thanks to its contribution of about one-third of the academic papers published in the most prestigious international journals.
According to a report by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), which is part of the Ministry of Science and Technology, of the 54,002 papers published in 159 journals with the highest impact factors in 178 disciplines in 2017, 16,349 were written by Chinese authors.
Of the almost 350,000 high-quality publications listed in 371 worldwide journals with high impact factors and citations, about 27% had primary authors based in Chinese institutions. China led the globe in both the number of articles published and the number of citations generated by these works, with a total of approximately 650,000 citations.
Based on the number of scholarly articles and reviews published in 16 prestigious journals with an impact factor of 30 or higher and generating over 100,000 citations in 2022, China ranked second worldwide.
This is consistent with the findings of the June 2023 Nature Index, which reported that China had surpassed the United States in the percentage of natural science papers published in high-impact journals.
