China and the Royal Society

Sat Apr 2 06:12:46 EDT 2011

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On March 28, the BBC quoted from a report of the Royal Society entitled
"Knowledge, networks and nations: Global scientific collaboration in the
21st century" that the major conclusion would be that: "China is on course
to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 - far
earlier than expected."

Although the report suggests that this conlcusion is based on Scopus data,
careful reading of the text informs that this is infered from "a simple
linear interpretation of Elsevier's publishing data". I assume that this is
the collection of everything published by Elsevier in terms of journals and
books (and perhaps other materials). Amazingly, 2008 is the last point of
observation. The bumps in the curve indicate that this is deviant data.

I mention this because in a recent preprint entitled "Publish or Patent:
Bibliometric evidence for empirical trade-offs in national funding
strategies" (http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1102/1102.3047.pdf), Robert
D. Shelton and I reported on a revision of our previous predictions about
this change in the trend. Previously, one had to assume exponential growth
in the percentage share of China, but since a number of years linear growth
provides the better fit:

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Figure 5: Forecast of percentage world share using extrapolation of a best
fit based on data for 2003-2010 (cf. Leydesdorff & Wagner, 2009a, Figure 1,
at p. 356). 

This is based on using all so-called "citable items" in the Science Citation
Index (Expanded edition on the Web-of-Science), that is: articles,
proceedings papers, reviews, and letters (measured on January 22, 2011, and
thefore including 2010 data). I assume that a similar representation could
be made using Scopus data, but Elsevier and/or the Royal Society for one
reason or another prefered to use "Elsevier's publication data". 

But even this forecast is a bit dubious (as are all forecasts). The change
from exponential growth to linear growth indicates a change in the
underlying mechanism. Linear growth is well known in studies of this
database (the SCI) and tends to indicate that there is an increasing
tendency no longer to produce within a national context, but increasingly
internationally. This reserve capacity is thus mobilized. 

In a previous publication, Ping Zhou and I assumed that the exceptional
(since exponential growth of China in the late 1990s and the first half the
of the 2000s was due to the huge reservoir of Chinese academic manpower
wishing to participate in internationally publishing. This acceleration
seems now to be exhausted. A further bending of the curve for linear growth
towards a plateau has always been observed in other cases (Spain, Korea,
etc.). Ping also notes that the influx in academia in China is stagnating.
Thus, the demographics and the marginal costs-given the competition-may be
inhibiting factors in the next ten years. 

I thought that I should let this know given the media attention to the
report of the Royal Society, and in order to inform this discussion. 

Best wishes,

Loet

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel. +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-842239111

 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Visiting Professor, ISTIC,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>
Beijing; Honorary Fellow, SPRU,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> University
of Sussex 

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