#nature-index

#nature-index

China's overall Share from September 2024 to August 2025 exceeded 38,000 and is on course to double that of the United States within the next two years.

The clear divergence in approaches to public research funding in the East and West is laid bare in the first Nature Index ranking for applied sciences. China dominates the ranking and other Asian countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, boast an outsized performance in the field for the scale of their overall research output. It's a different story for many Western countries, however, which have a relatively small Nature Index output in the applied sciences.

In 2018, I argued that China's meteoric growth in research output masked deeper structural issues, including inconsistent research quality and a 'publish or perish' academic culture. Seven years on, that picture has changed. Research quality in China has improved: in 2023, it overtook the United States as the leading country in the Nature Index, which tracks output in high-quality natural- and health-sciences journals. Since then, the gap between the two countries has only widened.