Comparison of China/USA science and technology performance

The relative performance of science and technology (S&T) in the USA and PRC was compared in terms of quantity and quality, as reflected in their technical literatures. Three databases (Science Citation Index (SCI), INSPEC, Ei Compendex) were selected for the quantity comparison, and citation analysis in the SCI was used for the quality comparison. Thirty technology and research areas were compared for quantity production, and are presented in this paper. These 30 areas were selected based on our previous assessment of PRC S&T output, and represented areas of emphasis by the PRC in physical, environmental, engineering, and life sciences.In almost all technical areas, the USA had the quantity (number of papers) lead (for the period 2002–2007) based on the SCI results, although the PRC has made dramatic strides to overtake the USA. In most of the technical areas, by 2007 PRC had attained parity with, or exceeded, the S&T literature production of the USA in the INSPEC database. The major exceptions were the biomedical field and some aspects of environmental science, where the USA still had a large lead. For most technical areas, by 2007 the PRC had even higher relative S&T literature production, based on the Ei Compendex, compared to the INSPEC results. Moreover, the USA production appears to have peaked (in the Ei Compendex) in the 2005 time frame, despite increasing amounts of funding for S&T research. The PRC challenge in non-biomedical research and technology sectors becomes apparent in those databases that do not contain substantial biomedical research papers, and therefore remove a substantial intrinsic USA advantage.For quality computations, the publication and citation results were normalized to discrete slices of time, and are presented for nanotechnology only (for the period 1998–2003). While the USA held a commanding lead in quality over the PRC (and the other major nanotechnology producer nations as well) during the past decade, the PRC has increased the quality of its publications monotonically, and now appears to be competitive with France, Italy, Japan, and Australia, using the quality metric in this paper.